For the award-winning Around the World in 80 Trains, Monisha Rajesh travelled some 45,000 miles, crossing Europe in just a month. For her next book, Moonlight Express (Bloomsbury, £22, August 28), she takes things a little more slowly, “trading the mayhem of constant international connections for the quiet of a night-time cabin”.
On her journey — sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend or members of her family — “she samples reindeer stew in Scandinavia, retraces the original route of the Orient Express, sips on pisco sours aboard the Andean Explorer, and watches the sun rise over the Potomac River on the Silver Meteor to New York”.

Trains are a new subject for Nige Tassell, who in 10 previous works of non-fiction has covered subjects from the Tour de France to the film Fargo. In Final Destination (Harper Collins, £20), published earlier this month, he travels to some of the most obscure parts of the British rail network, from Wick to Penzance. “By delving into their histories, by speaking to their people and by having a good old-fashioned nose around, Tassell reveals much about places that rarely have light cast upon them – from ferry ports to abandoned resorts, from tiny hamlets to towns being reclaimed by the sea.”

One of the guests on Loose Ends on Radio 4 last week was the writer Ben Aitken, talking about his latest book, Sh*tty Breaks, and “explaining the joys of travelling in the opposite direction to everybody else and still managing to get a great Instagram photo”. 

The Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature, an annual award of £10,000 for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry “best evoking the spirit of a place”, went last week to Carys Davies for her novel Clear (Granta), the story of two men who form an unlikely bond when one is sent to evict the other from an island during the Highland Clearances.