An invitation to reimagine rivers and life; a journey in celebration of festivals and one in search of monsters; walks by pathfinding mothers and dives by a man in search of Atlantis: these are some of the new books on travel and place coming this year
JANUARY
A Quiet Evening: The travels of Norman Lewis, selected and introduced by John Hatt (Eland, £25, January 16)
I have a dozen books by Norman Lewis (1908-2003) on my shelves, including two he signed for me, but I’m still looking forward to reading this anthology of his journalism. John Hatt, who founded Eland and whose first publication was Lewis’s A Dragon Apparent, says he has included “all the best articles from Norman’s entire life”. Among the 36, written over nearly five decades, are his report for The Sunday Times in 1969 on the genocide of indigenous people in Brazil (which led to the founding of Survival International); a hymn to Seville, his favourite Spanish city; and an interview in which he “provokes Ernest Hemingway in Havana”. I’m reminded that Lewis was cast away with his Desert Island Discs in 1986, and that the interview by Michael Parkinson is still available on BBC Sounds; well worth a listen.
FEBRUARY
Welcome to Paradise by Mahi Binebine (Eland, £14.99, February 6)
Binebine, an artist and writer born in Marrakesh, “opens a window into the hearts of a small group of African would-be emigrants, waiting on the beach in Morocco for a boat that will take them to a new life in Europe… Welcome to Paradise is a striking tale of human desperation and of the media-fuelled fantasies of Western life that hold a fatal allure.”
Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Rocks by Philip Marsden (Granta, £20, February 13)
In his latest work, Marsden, whose books include The Spirit-Wrestlers, Rising Ground and The Summer Isles, journeys from the tin mines of his homeland of Cornwall to the gold mountains of Georgia, “in search of the substances that have both shaped our imagination and imperilled our very existence”. Colin Thubron, an early reader, says that Under a Metal Sky is “a luminously rich exploration of the mineral wonderland beneath our feet. Imaginatively travelled and beautifully written.”
A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts (Doubleday, £22, February 20)
On her latest journey, the author of the acclaimed The Lost Pianos of Siberia follows in the footsteps of four elephants that were shipped in the 19th century from India to the East African coast and then marched inland to the Congo. All part of King Leopold of Belgium’s plan to train African elephants and use them to crack open the continent. Justin Marozzi, author of Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, says Roberts has written “A brave and searching book, rich in history and fierce in spirit. The best sort of travel writing: handsome prose, teeming with humanity and an unwavering sense of wonder.”
The North Pole: The History of An Obsession by Erling Kagge (Viking, £22, February 27)
The Norwegian adventurer, the first person in history to reach “the three Poles” – North, South and the summit of Mount Everest — explains how and why “the silver-shining vacantness”of the far Arctic has gripped him and others through the ages. The author and historian Anne Applebaum says this is “An extraordinary book that defies genre: an elegant travel account, a learned history and a psychological thriller wrapped in one.”
MARCH
There She Goes: New travel writing by women, edited by Esa Aldegheri (Saraband, £14.99, March 6)
In Free to Go: Across the World on a Motorbike (2022), Aldegheri, a multilingual poet, writer and academic, explored freedom and borders, both geopolitical and personal. Here she brings together 17 writers – of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry – in an anthology of tales “to inspire, encourage and empower women adventuring through the world in different ways and stages of life”.
Pathfinding: On Walking, Motherhood and Freedom by Kerri Andrews (Elliott & Thompson, £16.99, March 13)
In Wanderers and Way Makers, Andrews demonstrated forcefully that the literary history of walking had been written by women as well as by men. In the wake of “the complete metamorphosis of becoming a mother”, however, she wondered whether the hills, and the freedom she found on them, were still for her. Through a series of journeys, on which she draws on the accounts of predecessors from Mary Wollstonecraft to Kate Chopin, she offers “a powerful and much-needed invitation to mothers today to reclaim that sense of power, pleasure and liberation”.
Our Oaken Bones by Merlin Hanbury-Tenison (Witness Books, £22, March 20)
Hanbury-Tenison — founder of the rainforest charity The Thousand Year Trust — and his wife Lizzie, both suffering from mental illness, left behind the stress of London to return to his childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor. In Oaken Bones, he tells how they revived a family, a farm and ancient woodlands. It’s “an honest and intimate true story about renewal, the astonishing healing power of nature, and our duty to heal it in return”.
Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark by Dan Richards (Canongate, March 27)
In Outpost, Richards offered a sprightly tour of places on the edge, including the lighthouse; in Overnight, he shows us what we miss after lights-out. The book “is the product of four years of travel, interviews and research: from the high stakes of a helicopter search-and-rescue team to the deliriously sleepless nights of young parents; from Shetland to Finland and France, hospital beds to racetracks, it’s an attempt to reclaim the night – to find joy and warmth in darkness – but also to explore those parts of our society that are often out of view and out of mind.”
Seascape: Notes from a Changing Coastline by Matthew Yeomans (Calon/University of Wales Press, £18.99)
On a series of journeys along the 870-mile-long Wales Coast Path, Yeomans, an author and journalist, seeks to show how the sea has influenced the country’s rich mythology, literature and culture and how it is playing a growing role in our lives. Seascape also “challenges us to face the realities of climate change and how we will need to adapt where and how we live”.
The Invention of Amsterdam by Ben Coates (Scribe, £12.99, March 13)
Coates, author of Why The Dutch Are Different, is an Englishman who lives with his family in the countryside near Amsterdam. When he injures his leg and needs to rebuild his strength by walking, he uses the opportunity to rediscover, at a slower pace, the place he has been working in for over a decade. Over 10 outings, he presents “an entertaining and sharply observed portrait of a fascinating and complicated city”.
In Green: Two Horses, Two Strangers, a Journey to the
End of the Land by Louis D Hall (Duckworth, £18.99, March 20)
I hadn’t heard of this book till yesterday, when Cal Flyn (author of Islands of Abandonment), mentioned it on Bluesky. Louis D Hall has been seeing the world from the saddle since he was 18, when he went to northern Mongolia in search of the nomadic Tsaatan tribe. In his first book, he tells of his 110-day journey from the Apennines to Cape Finisterre on an Arabian horse called Sasha, and the lessons he learned from the young woman they met on the way. Flyn says it’s “A classic adventure narrative in the vein of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Robert Louis Stevenson… a life-changing continental trek”.
APRIL
Monsterland: A journey around the world’s dark imagination by Nicholas Jubber (Scribe, £20, April 10)
Jubber — whose first book, The Prester Quest, won him what was then the Dolman Travel Book Award — says he is “fascinated by storytelling… and the connections (or misconnections!) between past and present”. In Monsterland, he sets out to learn more about the figures with which we’ve been scaring ourselves since we first began telling tales. He sits on the thrones of giants in Cornwall, visits the shrine of a beheaded ogre near Kyoto, and paddles among the shapeshifters of the Louisiana bayous. The book is “a spellbinding interrogation into why we need these monsters and what they can tell us about ourselves”.
Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling (Daunt Books, £10.99, April 10)
Following last year’s anthology of essays on rivers, Daunt promises “an evocative celebration of life on two wheels”, with contributions from writers including Mina Holland, Jon McGregor and Dervla Murphy.
The Drowned Places: Diving in Search of Atlantis by Damian Le Bas (Chatto & Windus, £20, April 17)
Le Bas, author of the award-winning The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain (2018), has been enthralled since he was a child by the myth of Atlantis. After the death of his father, and despite the taboo his Romany culture places on the ocean, he found himself drawn into a dive shop. In The Drowned Places he offers “a spellbinding love letter to diving” and “a profound examination of the power that myth has over us”.
Life In Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East by Victoria Donovan (Daunt Books, £20, April 24)
Donovan, professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews, offers “an urgent, essential read” on the eastern region of Donbas, which has become synonymous with conflict since Russia began its war in 2014. Her book is “a cultural portrait, introducing us to this region’s people, landscape, and past and present, and presenting an identity away from the rubble of war”. The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov (author of Death and the Penguin), says she “takes you to the places that don’t exist any more. It’s like a virtual tour.”
Red Pockets by Alice Mah (Allen Lane, £20, April 24)
Returning to her ancestral village in southern China to visit the graves of her forgotten forebears, the writer and academic Mah reflects on the places she has lived, from post-industrial England to rugged Scotland, and contends with eco-anxiety and a crisis of spiritual belief. “This haunting blend of memoir and cultural history calls into question our duty to past and future generations, and the places we call home.”
MAY
Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £25, May 1)
Macfarlane, who has transported us in a series of books from the mountains to the underland, says his latest has become “the most political, personal and (possibly) poetic… I’ve written”. It’s focused on the idea that rivers, forests and mountains are living beings and have rights that should be recognised both in imagination and in law. It’s structured as a triptych of journeys: to the cloud-forests of Ecuador, the wild rivers of Canada and the mountains and lagoons of India. His answer to that question in the title: a resounding “YES.”
Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece by Julian Hoffman (Elliott & Thompson, £18.99, May 15)
Hoffman was born in the north-east of England and grew up in southern Ontario, but since the summer of 2000 he has been living with his wife in a mountain village beside the Prespa Lakes, which are shared by Greece, Albania and North Macedonia. Lifelines, his third book, tells of their move there from London. It’s a story, he says, “of shelter, generosity and welcome. A story of people, pelicans, borders and bears. A story of a shared world where three countries come together around two ancient lakes.”
The City and the World by Gregor Hens (Fitzcarraldo, £14.99, May 22)
Hens, a German writer and translator, travels the world – from Berlin to Las Vegas to Shenzhen, from Cologne to Santiago de Chile to Paris – reading, walking and swimming, asking how we perceive the city and how it may perceive us. His publisher promises “a captivating, illuminating and expansive journey into the heart of the modern city”.
The Passenger: Thailand (Europa Editions, £18.99, May 22)
A first issue from South-East Asia of the place-centred magazine, which offers new writing, photography, art and reportage. Contributors include Pitchaya Sudbanthad (author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain), on “Buddhism, the state and superpowers”; and Emma Larkin (author of Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok), on “The country of spirits”.
Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth (Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99, May 29)
In his acclaimed debut, Kings of the Yukon, Weymouth canoed the length of the river, looking into the decline in numbers of king salmon and showing how the lives of those who depend on the fish are changing. In his next book, he follows the trail of a wolf named Slavc, which was tracked by GPS making a thousand-mile journey through the Alps from Slovenia to northern Italy. Lone Wolf, his publisher says, throws “unique light on Europe’s mountainous hinterlands at a moment of political and environmental change”.
How to Save the Amazon by Dom Phillips and contributors (Manilla Press/Bonnier, £22, May 27)
Phillips, a long-time resident of Brazil who reported for papers including The Guardian and The Washington Post, was researching this when he was shot dead in 2022 with Bruno Pereira, a renowned defender of the rights of indigenous people. Colleagues and supporters have come together to finish the book, which Phillips hoped would “inspire people to think differently about the world’s greatest rainforest and how they can contribute towards protecting it”.
JUNE
Portrait of an Island on Fire by Ariel Saramandi (Fitzcarraldo, £14.99, June 19)
The Indian Ocean island of Mauritius is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, from rising sea levels to declining annual rainfall. In this collection of essays, Saramandi, a British-Mauritian writer who lives there, shows how the lasting effects of colonialism play out in everything from environmental policy to the way individuals relate to one another. Her book is “a searing account” of the island “at a crucial moment in its history”.
JULY
Small Earthquakes by Shafik Meghji (Hurst, £25, July)
Meghji — whose debut, Crossed Off the Map, was short-listed for the 2023 Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year — journeys from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego, Easter Island to South Georgia, exploring Britain’s impact on, and lost connections with, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Drawing on more than 15 years’ experience of living, working and travelling in South America, he tells a tale featuring nitrate kings and wool barons, footballers and pirates, polar explorers and radical MPs, cowboys and missionaries. Small Earthquakes “provides a sweeping account of a forgotten – but enduringly relevant – shared history”.
AUGUST
Fiesta: A Journey Through Festivity by Daniel Stables (Icon Books, £20, August 14)
In his debut, Stables, who has been working as a travel writer for a decade, offers a journey through human festivity. The book will examine human culture and the natural world “through rich, first-person travel narratives”, drawing on “insights from the fields of anthropology, history, psychology and folklore”.
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