Motya - Unearthing a Lost Civilisation, by Gaia Servadio
(Victor Gollancz, £16.99)
A civilised bunch, the ancient Greeks. When they stormed Motya, a tiny Phoenician outpost off the coast of Sicily, they burned and raped like the barbarians they despised. So sudden was the massacre that the inhabitants barely had time to bury their valuables.
Calamity, of course, is the mother of romance. Imagine. An island in the Med, veined with buried walls, stuffed with hidden riches. A beach where every boulder is a stone sarcophagus. A paradise of figs and grilled fish where the sun sets behind ruined watchtowers, 2,500 years old. Servadio skips none of the romance as she tells the story of Motya from its heyday as a daughter of Carthage to its rediscovery in the heroic age of archaeology.
But romantics beware. This is Mafia country - a place where the present can be almost as nasty as the past.
Lost White Tribes - Journeys Among the Forgotten, by Riccardo Orizio
(Secker & Warburg, £15.99)
"Perhaps, although they're trash, they think they're better than we are." That was the author's Sinhalese friend, giving his verdict on a young white waiter in a small hotel in Sri Lanka. "He's only a Dutch Burgher. Don't bother your head about them."
But Orizio did bother. In fact he became quite fascinated with these "lost white tribes" - Germans, French, Dutch, Poles - poor descendants of the rich white colonists who couldn't afford to take a steamer home when the colonial dream ended. Too white for some, too native for others, their society, says Orizio, is often "a closed, incestuous microcosm". And for many, the future holds nothing but extinction.
The Pharaoh's Shadow, by Anthony Sattin
(Victor Gollancz, £20)
What could be more dead and gone than the customs and beliefs of Ancient Egypt? Pharoahs, priests, cults and gods, all are done and dusted, swept aside by Christianity and Islam, buried in sand and mobile phones. Or are they? In the 1920s, the anthropologist Winifred Jackman suggested that many of the ancient ways had in fact survived the passing millennia, and could be traced in the manners and rituals of ordinary Egyptians.
Could it be true? Sattin's curiosity was awakened when he witnessed a woman in a remote temple calling on one of the old gods to bless her with a child. Sure enough, when he began looking - whether in the streets of Cairo or the cemeteries of Alexandria - he found evidence that paganism is alive and well. But how much longer can it hold out against the modernisers and the fundamentalists?
A Shopper's Guide to Paris Fashion, by Alicia Drake
(Metro, £9.99)
As somebody who buys his clothes at M&S, and will continue to do so until media pressure forces them to cater exclusively for people with more money than tummy, I have little interest in where Jeff Goldblum buys his relaxed, chic menswear (Marcel Lassance, Rue du Vieux Colombier). Nor do I care where Hillary Clinton buys Chelsea's ballet gear (Repetto, Rue de la Paix) or Mick Hucknall takes a steam bath when shopping in the 3rd and 4th Arrondissements (Les Bains du Marais, Rue des Blancs Manteaux).
If I did (and I don't), then this book, with its "insider secrets" about sales that aren't really sales and designer clothes that aren't really designer clothes (they just look like them) would be perfect for me. Now where was I? Ah yes. M&S.
Home Truths, by Bill Murphy
(Mainstream, £7.99)
Forget John Peel's optimistic Radio 4 programme of the same name. Murphy spent eight months touring ordinary English towns and cities and concludes that, with the possible exception of Norwich ("I suppose Norwich really is the least objection able place outside London"), the country and all who sail in her have gone to the dogs.
To give him credit, he went where few travel writers venture - places such as Woking, Macclesfield, Huntingdon and Romford - and spent his time in the town-centre pubs and cheap Chinese restaurants, the 1960s housing estates and the 1980s shopping malls that are home to most of the English most of the time.
In Braintree, he noted that all the women have tattoos. In Stoke, he reckoned that only the prostitutes were having a good time. But although some of this needed saying, more of it didn't. And John Peel would have said it with more compassion.
Hungry for Home, by Cole Moreton
(Viking, £14.99)
Five years ago, I stood on the edge of Kerry - the most westerly point of the European mainland - and gazed across the sea at a distant mountain. It was a sunny day, and I couldn't for the life of me see why, half a century ago, an entire community had begged to be evacuated from what looked to my town-weary eyes like some island paradise.
But as I wandered around the modern "interpretation centre", read the newspaper cuttings and studied the stormy black-and-white photos, I began to understand something of what life must have been like for those last inhabitants of the Blasket Islands.
Blasket. The very name smells of wet stone. So where did they end up, those sur vivors of an ancient race who had lived as medieval peasants within my own lifetime? Moreton set out to trace the exiled families and found many of them living now in the most modern country in the world.
The Independent Hostel Guide, edited by Sam Dalley
(The Backpackers Press, £4.95)
Mrs Wilkins has a vacancy. In here, see? It's a delightful room, right at the front of the bungalow, and overlooking the cul-de-sac. The bedspread is pink and peach candlewick, although you can hardly see it. For this is where Mrs Wilkins keeps the 83 soft toys that she knitted in between embroidering the frilled pillow cases and making the dried-flower pictures of woodland scenes that adorn the dressing table.
Breakfast is between seven and eight, the bathroom (more embroidery) is across the landing, and Mrs Wilkins sleeps in here (taps plaster-board partition wall) with Mr Wilkins, who is a part-time fireman with a fine baritone snore.
Bed and breakfast - don't you love it? But in this country, where a night's shelter is rated a luxury item, what are the alternatives? There's a room above the main refrigeration unit at The Westbrook (residents' bar, parking at rear, all cards accepted), but that will set you back £65 - and plenty more if you so much as look at the mini-bar or the bedside telephone.
Perhaps it's time to think about a backpackers' hostel. They seem to be everywhere these days, from Snowdon to Hadrian's Wall, and you'll even find a handful in central London. There are nearly 300 listed here, and for the first time this guide includes a selection in Europe. Many are worth visiting for the names alone (try the Barn at the Back of Beyond, Stronsay Fish Mart and Shitlington Crag Bunkhouse) and prices start at around £8 per night. Facilities range from a simple sleeping platform to single room with bedding. But don't panic. Candlewick is simply not an option.
Catfish & Mandala, by Andrew X Pham
(Flamingo, £10.99)
A young man takes a year out to cycle alone around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam . . . comes home and writes a book about his adventures . . . haven't we read it a thousand times before? But wait. This is different.
Pham's family were "boat people". A young child when Saigon fell, he grew up as a Vietnamese-American in California. He was neither Vietnamese nor American, and he wondered what the hyphen meant. His father had been in a Viet-Cong prison camp, and his sister wanted to be a boy. On the street, war vets would tell him, "I was in Nam and I'm really sorry."
Sooner or later, he had to make that painful trip, to see for himself the fat American tourists squeezing themselves into narrow VC dug-outs, or buying model helicopter gunships fashioned from Coke tins. At the end of it all, he wrote the book - not about himself, but about two war-scarred countries, separated by a hyphen.
