Peter Ross, a prize-winning author and journalist based in Glasgow, has given us portraits of Britain through its churches (Steeple Chasing) and its graveyards (A Tomb With a View). In Upon A White Horse, published last week (Headline, £22), he travels round prehistoric sites in both Britain and Ireland, asking who made these structures and why, and what they mean to us now. In a piece for The Guardian, Ross says he wishes he’d become an archaeologist, and that the book is an attempt to walk something of “a path not taken”. His publisher sums it up as “a celebration of landscape and people – and all that is beautiful, strange and old”.

Miles Morland, a banker turned bestselling author (The Man Who Broke out of the Bank) and founder of a charity that supports African voices, learned to ride a motorbike in his mid-sixties and spent the next 15 years on the road. In The Hopeless Biker — Who Went Twice Round the World (Muswell Press, £25, October 30), he tells how, though he’d never previously ridden at night, in rain or on motorways, and couldn’t tell a carburettor from a spark plug, he somehow managed to cross five continents. The Hopeless Biker “is about letting go, going it alone, and trusting you’ll survive to discover what’s on the other side of the mountain”.

Brad Fox, a prize-winning writer based in New York, spent the early months of quarantine reporting on how the Covid pandemic was viewed by a traditional healer in the Peruvian Andes. Having arrived for what he expected would be 10 days, he ended up staying a year in a hundred-hectare stretch of jungle four hours’ walk from the nearest dirt road. In Another Bone-Swapping Event (Icon Books, £20, November 6), he “takes us on a wild exploration of plants and people, imagination and matter”. Joanna Pocock, an early reader, says the book is “a profound meditation on what it means to exist on a fragile and vulnerable planet while simultaneously exploring its frayed, otherworldly edges”.