The travel book genre continues to remain on the big stage in bookshops, despite the effort of critics to elbow it into the wings over the last few years. Jonathan Raban's A Passage to Juneau, A Sea and its Meanings (Picador, £16.99 in UK) has been greeted as his best book yet; thoughtful, thought- provoking, and written in gorgeous effortless prose. Considerable personal cost, however, comes with the authorship of this book: the solo voyage from Seattle to Alaska ends just at the same time as Raban's marriage.
Colin Thubron's In Siberia (Chatto and Windus, £17.99 in UK), his third book about the Soviet Union, attracted a clutch of rave reviews. Travelling by train, truck, and river, Thubron covers 15,000 miles, casting his considered eye across the often debilitated post-Communist society.
Fortune Hotel, edited by Sarah Champion (Hamish Hamiliton, £9.99 in UK), is an anthology of original and alternative travel writing. No fey musings here, but plenty of accounts of weird encounters, cracked fellow travellers, and subversive sight-seeing in places as diverse as Kathmandu, Karachi, Marseille, Berlin, and Kazakstan. Contributors include Will Self, Esther Freud, Emily Perkins, and Emer Martin.
Two books by Irish writers this year were Dervla Murphy's One Foot in Laos (John Murray, £18.99 in UK) and Harry Clifton's On the Spine of Italy, A Year in the Abruzzi (Macmillan, £12.99 in UK). Murphy has interesting insights into a country that's not much known over here. Clifton writes lyrically of his year in an abandoned parish house in a remote Italian village. Unlike others who've written versions of the same sort of book, Clifton's is both free of patronising and gushing.
