Writing on travel, place and nature features strongly in the September issue of the Literary Review.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent of the BBC, is reviewed by the historian (and co-author of a guidebook to Afghanistan) Bijan Omrani. He says “the day-to-day life of the hotel, its guests and staff, brilliantly captured by Doucet,… vividly reflects the country’s history.”

Easter Island, now known by the Polynesian name Rapa Nui, is a place synonymous with towering anthropomorphic stone statues, or moai. In Island at the Edge of the World (Bloomsbury, £25), the writer and archaeologist Mike Pitts rejects the legends and “histories” that have grown up around the statues over the past two centuries and offers a new story of how and why the islanders built them. “In this detailed, intelligent, humane work,” says Patrick Wilcken, “Pitts has given us a salutary corrective to centuries of Western prejudice and fantasy.”

Two books on journeys into the night are reviewed by the biographer and critic Phil Baker. One is Dan Richards’s Overnight (Canongate), which I mentioned here earlier in the year; Baker says it’s “for the most part a celebration of the unsung heroism of people who work through the hours of darkness… a book about various forms of care and service, and more than a few times it succeeds in bringing a lump to the throat”. The other book is Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar (Sceptre), chief theatre critic of The Guardian, in which darkness is frequently unsettling and “the spectre of predatory male violence is ever-present”.

In Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (Yale University Press), Mia Bennett, a geographer, and Klaus Dodds, an expert on geopolitics, consider both the melting of the ice and the danger of the Arctic’s becoming a scene of great-power conflict. The historian Michael Burleigh says “This excellent book is a highly informative guide to both climate change and security issues, even if the array of facts might have benefited from more in the way of authorial comment and fewer acronyms. Who could disagree with the implicit conclusion that the world we are in the process of losing appears a great deal more attractive than the one whose genesis we are observing?”

The writer and academic Norma Clarke says Jenny Uglow’s A Year With Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer (Faber & Faber, £25) “glows with the combined enthusiasm of two brilliant natural historians recording the minutiae of the world around them… A feast of a book, it is beautifully illustrated and compulsively readable.”