In The Sunday Times, Justin Marozzi reviewed the latest book by Hannah Lucinda Smith, former Turkey correspondent for The Times: Hinterlands: A Journey Through Europe’s Unfinished Frontiers (Profile, £22). It is, he says, “an engaging cross between Dom Joly’s Dark Tourist and Tom Parfitt’s High Caucasus, a 1,000-mile traverse from the Caspian to the Black Sea through the little-known statelets of Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan”. Smith, he says, reminds us that Europe is home to 34 disputed territories “where a new cold war is being fought, in some places overtly, in others with the less traditional weapons of ‘misinformation, cryptocurrency and construction’”. Smith, he says, “revels in the journalist’s art of telling good stories paired with incisive analysis”.

In the FTWeekend, the science journalist Clive Cookson welcomed Robert Moor’s In Trees (Viking £20), “an extraordinary evocation of trees around the world and the way people interact with them”. Parts of the book, he says, “read a bit like self-indulgent rambles, as for example when Moor searches for his own ancestral roots in order to build a family tree. But on the whole [it] is entertaining, original and inspiring… it will make you think deeply about the place of humanity in the natural world.”

In The Observer, Tanya Gold reviewed Rough Edges (Sceptre, £20), in which Natasha Carthew, “a riveting, self-aware narrator” who was priced out of her homeland of Cornwall, travels round coastal communities elsewhere in Britain to document what she calls the “salt belt of deprivation”.