I am what you might call a vicarious traveller. I would love to travel the world but am not able to at this point in my life, so I travel from my living room, watching TV and reading books. Among my favourites are the Long Way Round and Long Way Down shows by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, along with Charley’s solo shows. Russ Malkin was an integral part of the team for these adventures, both as producer and as a member of the support team, so you can understand I was quite excited to hear about his book, Big Earth: 101 Amazing Adventures.

Big Earth is a kind of “directory” of trips, adventures and experiences which you can undertake around the world.

Russ Malkin

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I wasn’t expecting to like Holy Cow by Sarah Macdonald. She got off to a bad start for me with some glaring geographic and historical errors (claiming Rishikesh was 200 km from Dehradun – it’s about 40 minutes in a taxi) and a lot of moaning and whining about how filthy and smoggy Delhi was. I did think to myself “Oh no, here we go again. Another airhead antipodean off to India to ‘find’ herself and not bothering to do her research” and my instinct wasn’t entirely wrong – there’s far too much dipping into the smorgasbord of Indian religions and gurus for my liking – but along the way, I actually got drawn into her life in India, almost against my better intentions. As you might imagine, I didn’t buy this book – it was a donation from a kind friend and fellow review writer who I’m surprised to now realise hasn’t reviewed the book. Maybe it didn’t work so well for her either.

Sarah Macdonald

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For many years I have devoured travel books, usually about France or Italy but occasionally branching out elsewhere. As someone who doesn’t travel often or very far, they offer me an escapism and a chance to learn about and “see” other parts of the world.

Thumbs Up Australia: Hitchhiking the Outback by Tom Parry is the first travel book I have read about Australia however, and hopefully it won’t be the last. Parry sets off to Australia with his rather reluctant French girlfriend Katia, to re-explore the Outback which he hitched through when young and single. He has spent the intervening years lost in daydreams about Australia, and after much effort he managed to persuade Katia to join him in his journey.

Tom Parry

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Roy H Williams once wrote, “lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?”. This is a question that many of us will struggle to answer coherently, I suspect, but not Robert Penn. For Penn is a man with enthusiasm for all things pedal-powered; he has ridden a bike for thirty-six years, on nearly every day of his adult life, including one 40,000km, three-year, round the world trip as an apparent reaction to having been a pin-striped solicitor for too long. As his book “it’s all about the bike” – a cheeky riposte to Lance Armstrong’s best-selling biography about recovering from cancer to win the Tour de France – opens, Penn owns five bikes in various states of repair, but has decided he needs a new one. “I could go online right now with a credit card and spend £3000 on a mass-produced carbon or titanium racing bike” he writes. “It’s tempting, very tempting. But it’s not right. Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly…I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it…I want MY bike.”

Robert Penn

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Bereavement is a great catalyst for change. It makes us stop and reconsider what we want from life and in the case of a sudden loss, that sense of ‘do it now’ urgency is enhanced. Clare de Vries lost her mother very suddenly to pancreatic cancer, looked at her job and her life in London and wanted out of both. The problem is that sometimes when you want a change, you need someone to keep you company and your friends and relatives don’t want the same things you want or aren’t available when you need them. How could she find the perfect travel companion? Enter Claudius – the perfect loyal friend to take on a road trip across the USA. ‘I and Claudius‘ is the story of their road trip – and it’s fantastic.

De Vries describes what she was aiming for as a Thelma and Louise experience – without the rape and the killings of course.

Clare de Vries

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The blogosphere is well suited to the coverage of extended journeys or endurance achievements; there have, in recent years, been several excellent blogs written by cyclists (Tom Kevill-Davies’s The Hungry Cyclist and currently Alastair Humphreys’s terrifically entertaining blog covering his round the world cycle ride are just two of them) and a few of these have been the catalyst for full length books, proving not only the enduring popularity of cycling but just how much the public’s imagination i-s fired by tales of such feats of strength, daring and will to succeed.

Following on from “The Man Who Cycled the World”, an account of his record breaking trip of 2008, “The Man Who Cycled the Americas” is Mark Beaumont’s next major undertaking, cycling down the back bone of the continents of North and South America.

Mark Beaumont

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Alarm bells should have sounded when I picked up Roger Boyes’s “To Prussia with Love” in a bookstore and I thought to myself “this sounds a bit contrived”. Call me naïve but when I browse the travel writing section in Waterstones, I tend to believe that those books are based on the writers’ real life experiences. Not so, it seems; at least not if this book is anything to go by.

It all starts off quite reasonably. Boyes is a British journalist living in Berlin and submitting stories about German life to his editor back in Blighty; rather fortuitously, just as he’s yearning to do something different with his life, his German interior designer girlfriend informs him that she’s inherited a country house, not, as he hopes in rural Italy, but in Brandenburg ( in eastern Germany to most people these days but, as luck would have it for those looking for a catchy title for a book, it used to go by the name of Prussia).

Roger Boyes

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As a subject for a novel the road trip – or rail trip in the case of “Laikonik Express” – but in his full length debut Nick Sweeney has injected new life into the genre. I’ve tended to avoid road trip writing of late: somehow the trips are never nearly as interesting or exciting as my own. In “Laikonik Express”, though, I found a setting almost tailor-made for my own travel predilections, characters that I found both credible and engaging and more than its fair share of wry humour.

The story is simple yet as multi-layered as you want it to be. Nolan Kennedy, a young American teacher of English living and working in Istanbul has to find his friend (and alcoholic) Don Darius, a writer of sorts.

Nick Sweeney

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My friend Tina always claimed that the only relationship in her life which hadn’t been dysfunctional was with a Jack Russell Terrier. Exasperated by men both specifically and generally, she went searching for loving company in the shape of a large grey rescue Siamese by the name of Claude. They made the perfect couple. He was clean, polite and affectionate and didn’t shed too much fluff around the house. All he asked in return was food and cuddles.

With a friend like Tina, when I heard that writer Clare de Vries had taken her Burmese cat Claudius travelling with her for a year, it all made complete sense to me. And when Claudius died, Clare decided to hit the road again and go in search of perfect feline love. Since she would only consider a Burmese or a Siamese, she decided to go – not so surprisingly – to Burma and Thailand.

Clare de Vries

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You’ve Gone Too Far This Time, Sir! is the true account of Danny Bent’s journey from the UK to India…by bike. Inspired by teaching his class about underprivileged children in a village in India, he decided to go there to teach and help the children. When one of the children in his class in the UK asked how he planned to get there, his first thought was to reply “Plane, of course”, but he realised that by doing that he could undo a lot of the good work he had done in teaching the class about environmental issues. So he said he would cycle…

The journey is nothing short of epic. India is far away – even by plane. To travel there by a non-motorised form of transport is a huge undertaking, through Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Pakistan among other place.

Danny Bent

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In 1095, Byzantium was an empire under threat. From his seat in Constantinople, Emperor Alexius saw his territories across the Bosphorus in Anatolia coming under intense pressure from the Seljuk Turks, a Muslim people originating in central Asia who were steadily overrunning provinces that has been in the empire since Roman times. The Seljuks were not intruders to be taken lightly, and had succeeded not just in taking control of many Byzantine towns, but had also met the cream of the imperial army in combat and cut it to shreds. Faced with potentially catastrophic losses of land and power, he issued a plea for help to the Christians of the West to supply soldiers to come to his aid.

Tim Severin

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