The travel editor Tom Robbins, contributing to a five-page roundup of this year’s “must-read” books in FTWeekend, chose Upon A White Horse by Peter Ross (Headline), Three Rivers by Robert Winder (Elliott & Thompson), Greyhound by Joanna Pocock (Fitzcarraldo), Cabin by Patrick Hutchison (William Collins) and A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts (Doubleday).

Under literary non-fiction, Carl Wilkinson included Jenny Uglow’s A Year With Gilbert White (Faber); under poetry, Maria Crawford included Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems (Allen Lane), a book which “celebrates the power of poems to transport readers to the settings in which they were written (or spoken), from the 7th-century Venerable Bede to a post-Brexit cricket green”.