Thanks to my local branch of Waterstones for alerting me to a book I’d certainly have mentioned if I’d heard about it in advance of publication. Prominent on the shelves there, among newish non-fiction, is An Inconvenience of Penguins by Jamie Lafferty (Wildfire/Headline, £22), which I see from the Headline site came out at the end of September. Lafferty is an award-winning travel writer, and his book, the publisher says, is “part love-letter to and part biography of these remarkable creatures”.

“From kings and emperors to macaronis and rockhoppers, penguins are one of the most immediately recognisable animals on Earth. Yet for all that familiarity, what do we really know about them?… On voyages to some of the planet’s most inaccessible and challenging landscapes, [Lafferty] recounts the history of our unique relationship with the world’s most popular bird, telling not only the stories of the penguins, but also of the people and places around them.”

Early readers included the naturalist Stephen Moss (author of Ten Birds That Changed the World), who says that “Jamie Lafferty embarks on an epic quest – in which the journey is at least as entertaining as the end result.”