Billy Connelly recounts with customary humour and humble insight his ten-week journey through the North West Passage, which included piloting an aeroplane over Iceberg Valley, trekking through mountains and an ancient riverbed, and encounters with ordinary people, who introduced him to traditions such as hunting and eating raw meat. The text is illustrated throughout with colour photographs, and includes background and historical information.

Britain’s landscapes have spurred adventures from Giraldus Cambrensis’s epic circuit of Wales in 1188 to HV Morton’s 1929 tour of Scotland in a bull-nosed Morris. The author and TV presenter Nicholas Crane traces the journeys of eight early travellers, by bike, car or on foot. Sometimes he adopts their original mode of transport, following the indomitable 17th-century lady Celia Fiennes on horseback, or the 18th-century clergyman William Gilpin through the north of England by boat.

Off-mint.

Off-mint.

On foot and by canoe, from Carlingford Lough to Derry/Londonderry, Lough Foyle and Magilligan Point on the northern coast, Jarrett Carr follows the twisted border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Travelling along rivers and through divided towns, villages and farms in borderlands with a troubled past and an uncertain future, Carr aims to examine ‘how the land and its people have reacted to the border, and the ways in which the line is made manifest’.

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The remote South Atlantic island of St Helena is famous as the site of Napoleon’s 68-month incarceration as ‘Europe’s prisoner’. Willms draws insights from his own visit as he investigates what life was like there and dispels legends that the Emperor himself helped to create.

Part travel book, part musings on life from the deck of a yacht, this is Larsson’s homage to Celtic lands and waters, from the westernmost point of Spain (Finisterre) to the north of Scotland (Cape Wrath). Translated from the Swedish by Tom Geddes.

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In 1867 Mark Twain joined a six-month tour of the Middle East amid a company of Presbyterians committed to bringing Christianity to the Ottoman Empire. Following in his footsteps, Ian Strathcarron travels through Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank to Jerusalem. He finds many parallels between the troubled region then and now, and rich ironies to match Twain’s observations of his travelling companions.

Mark Twain’s two-month sojourn in India formed the most absorbing part of a round-the-world tour he undertook in 1895–6. Retracing the American humorist’s itinerary, Strathcarron travels from Mumbai to the Himalayas, visiting Jaipur, Delhi, Varanasi and – in what is now Pakistan – Lahore. He stays in the same clubs, rides the same railways and, like his predecessor, meets both the mighty and the meek.

Having been raised in an Irish family in South Africa, the poet-novelist Christopher Hope grew up with a deep insight into apartheid. He returned to the country, after twelve years’ absence, during the 1987 whites-only election. Recalling a childhood road trip (as a white boy running through the landscape) he gives an objective account of the historic grievances of both Afrikaners and the black townships.

A quarter of a century after the end of apartheid, Christopher Hope embarks on a road trip through his homeland from Cape Town to the Zimbabwean border, meeting exploited black miners and embittered white nationalists. In the face of persisting economic inequality and interracial bitterness, he concludes that Nelson Mandela’s dream of a ‘rainbow nation’ is fading, and it might be the turn of the whites to hear what anti-apartheid politician Oliver Tambo called ‘the Move-on Blues’.