The independent London-based publisher Haus (one of whose directors, Ilse Schwepcke, is remembered in a new prize for travel writing by women) has had an “Armchair Traveller” imprint since 2005, bringing us everything from Jacky Collis Harvey’s Walking Pepys’s London to Jens Mühling’s Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea.* I mentioned one of its latest offerings, The Quantum of Happiness by Marius Kociejowski, last week. In October, there’ll be a couple more.

First comes In the Other Direction Now (£18.99, October 15) by Navid Kermani, “a remarkable work of literary non-fiction that follows the author through a vast arc of East Africa, charting the emotional, environmental and political faultlines that define the region”. Kermani, who was born in Siegen, Germany, into a family of Iranian migrants, has won numerous prizes for writing that champions a cultural dialogue between the Islamic and Western worlds. In this book, he travels from southern Madagascar to Sudan, through places ravaged by war and economic exploitation — the Comoros, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia. “But, from personal encounters and conversations on the road, [he] finds reasons for hope. Music emerges as a unifying thread, for example, and Christian hymns, Sufi dances and Sudanese jazz become symbols of resilience and transformation that bind communities across conflict, faith, and time.”

Then there’s Days on the Night Train (£16.99, October 29) by the Berlin-based writer and translator Millay Hyatt, a book that in 2025, under the title Nachtzugtage, won her the first Ilse Schwepcke Prize for travel literature by women published in German. Hyatt (who was born in Dallas, Texas) says that wherever she’s travelling she’ll aim to immerse herself in the “uncushioned encounters with the world” offered by a train. Her book is “a story of serendipities and missed connections, of sluggish border crossings, of embracing unpredictability and shunning the stifling regimentation of contemporary travel. In her accounts of her journeys across Europe and beyond, ranging from Edinburgh to Tunis, from Valencia to Tbilisi… she becomes intrigued by the intimate habits of her fellow passengers, listens in on arguing couples and bantering teenagers and gives her imagination free reign to speculate about their lives.”

* You can still read extracts on Deskbound Traveller from Jens Mühling’s A Journey into Russia and Black Earth.