The writer and broadcaster Horatio Clare, who has spent time on cargo vessels (for the prize-winning Down to the Sea in Ships) and an Arctic ice-breaker (Icebreaker – A Voyage Far North), turns his attention in his next book to much smaller boats — the ones used by refugees. In We Came by Sea: Stories of a greater Britain, to be published by Little Toller in May, he tells of the volunteers who help thousands of refugees in Calais, of lifeboat crews mounting search-and-rescue operations, and “of an unrecognised, uncelebrated… Britain which is giving its all to help the vulnerable and desperate”.

Jon Woolcott, one of the staff at Little Toller and an author himself (he has written Real Dorset and edited the anthology Going to Ground), has a new book coming in May next year. Aurum, part of the Quarto Group, has just acquired The Tattooed Hills, in which he makes a series of journeys to chalk-hill figures, those carvings that have inspired writers, artists and musicians, as well as the people who live in their shadow. Aurum says the book is “a history of these individual and surprisingly varied forms, but more than that it’s a meditation on the meaning of Englishness in the modern era, and considers questions of making, repair and loss”.