Europe, Special Places To Stay With Courses and Activities

As a whole, the book is pregnant with the Micawberish possibility of something turning up: truffle-hunting and cooking, astronomical guided tours, snowdrop cultivation, dry-stone walling and falconry.

Planning Your Gap Year (6th edition) Nick Vandome (How To Books, £9.99)

When the world's your oyster, it can be difficult deciding which way to shuck. Thankfully, here comes Nick Vandome, reseplendent in his sixth edition, to explain all about Planning Your Gap Year.

The Virgin Travel Health Handbook by Michael Wright (Virgin Books, £14.99)

This opus could equally well be entitled How to Scare Yourself Witless Before Setting Off On Your Holidays.

StyleCity London; StyleCity Paris, Thames & Hudson, £14.95 each

Written with girl-guide enthusiasm shot through with department of culture speak these Wallpaper-lite gazetteers nanny us through the uncertainties of vulgar city streets.

Irma la not-so-douce

Elaine Showalter enjoys Then Again, agony aunt Irma Kurtz's recollections of her first trip to Europe

Outside Magazine’s Urban Adventure – New York City, David Howard (WW Norton, £15.95)

While most visitors to New York are there for the nightlife, the culture and the shopping, for anyone with the need to break into a healthy sweat after the excesses of clubbing the night before, this is an indispensable guide.

Home on the range

If you want to know about America, hit the road with its nomads and travellers, and Richard Grant's Ghost Riders, says Jonathan Heawood

Flights of fancy

Tom Templeton, Lyn Russel, Jane Knight and Paul Simon on Ghost Riders | Then Again | Hearing Birds Fly | Running with Reindeer

Tinseltown without glitter

The strange and brilliant lunacy of the City of Angels proves elusive for AM Homes in her new book, Los Angeles

Pulpo – Paris Fashion Shopping, Edited by Nina Grandberg-Melin (Pulpo Publishing, £11)

Now, here's a bothersome little book, the kind of thing to ruin a girl's weekend.

Richard Grant’s top 10 books about wandering

Richard Grant is a freelance journalist based in Arizona and the author of Ghost Riders: Travels With American Nomads.

Climbing Down by Graham Wilson (Millrace Books, £13.95)

A book of eight long and appealing British rural walks. Each walk is illustrated by elegant pen-and-ink drawings by Gerry Dale, and the book is beautifully printed and sewn.

Sight lines

Bruce Chatwin made his name as a hugely talented writer but, as his widow Elizabeth tells Stuart Jeffries, he was also a prolific photographer.

5 best books

Duende: A Journey in Search of Flamenco | The Dark Heart of Italy | Ghost Riders: In Search of American Nomads | The Voyage of The Catalpa | The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica

Wherever I lay my hat

Some doctors suggest that it is a disease, but for Richard Grant constant travel is simply a way of life. Ian Sansom goes along for the ride in Ghost Riders