The potholed streets of Kabul are a sea of frozen mud and black ice. Decrepit taxis with threadbare tyres flounder in treacherous ruts. We pass a man chopping wood who, despite the sub-zero temperatures, is working in open-toed sandals without socks. Further on, two women in blue burqas and heels struggle along the broken pavement, peering down at the terrain through the cotton grilles of their suffocating garments.

Five years [...]

It almost goes without saying that Shadow of the Silk Road is an exquisitely written book. Colin Thubron is a grand master of the travel genre, and his prose is unfailingly poetic and evocative. By virtue of his pen, mountain peaks float like "astral ice-fields", deserts open into "camel-coloured voids" and rivers of "liquid loam roil" between gullies.

The human landscape through which Thubron travels is equally haunting. Making his [...]

It is a mark of a great travel book if, by about page 20, you feel the urge to drop everything and catch the next plane out of Heathrow. In Ghost Train Through the Andes, Michael Jacobs didn't have me reaching for my rucksack until page 38 - but only because he starts his quest in Hull. It's there that he picks up the trail of his grandfather Bethel Jacobs, [...]

Rory MacLean is not a hippie. And he's too young to remember the Summer of Love. But he is a consummate wanderer who is fast be-coming one of Britain's most expressive and adventurous travel writers. His new book, Magic Bus, takes him along the old "hippie trail", travelling some 6,000 miles from Istanbul to Kathmandu to find out what happened to the spiritual seekers who blazed it. In the end, [...]

Monica Ali's new novel starts with the beautifully drawn characters and detail you'd expect from an author whose first book, Brick Lane, captivated millions and was shortlisted for several major prizes. Joao, a peasant living in the Portuguese village of Mamarossa, emerges into the "tired morning light" thinking he's seen a scarecrow in the woods: "Joao walked out beneath the moss-skinned branches thinking only this: eighty-four years upon the earth [...]

The Hindustan Ambassador I hire is one of the few left on Delhi's roads. Among the shiny, new Tata Indigos and nippy Maruti hatchbacks, it looks so Old India, a reminder of the decades of industrial stagnation that, suddenly, everyone is in a tremendous hurry to shake off.

But I love it. I love the Morris Oxford design that hasn't changed in 50-odd years. I love the little curtains in [...]