Nicholas Crane’s The Path More Travelled (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25), which I mentioned last month, is reviewed in the Literary Review by Patrick Galbraith (environment correspondent of the Telegraph). It is, he says, a “fascinating” book, strengthened by Crane’s “jollity” and use of telling detail, though the author’s “matter-of-factness about historical events sometimes brings the reader up short”.

The latest book by Kapka Kassabova is reviewed in the same magazine by the Scottish poet Lesley Harrison. Following her acclaimed series on the Balkans, which has taken her back to her native Bulgaria, Kassabova turns her attention in Borrowed Land (Jonathan Cape, £22) to the place that has been her home for the past 15 years: a glen in the Highlands of Scotland, which is being transformed by vast energy projects. “A great strength of this book,” Harrison says, ” is Kassabova’s ongoing shock at the ‘evisceration’ [through the Clearances of the 19th century] of this vast area and the dismantling of its identity. It takes an outsider to see it afresh.” But she says that Kassabova’s objection to industrial infrastructure “seems mainly aesthetic” and the benefits “are hardly discussed”. While the author’s history of the glen is “detailed and interesting, and her mourning for its lost language genuine”, she fears that Kassabova is in danger of romanticising Scotland.