Travel books round-up - June 2012

New books from Hardeep Singh Kohli, Samanth Subramanian and Terry Darlington

This article is from 2012.

He may be a man of Glasgow, but Hardeep Singh Kohli knows a thing or two about travelling around London. In The 38 Bus: A Love Song to a Bus Route (Unbound) he pours out the emotions he has for the route which has served the capital for a century, taking in the East End, Soho and Covent Garden. In Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (Atlantic), her journey has her investigating everything from the use of fish to treat asthmatics in Hyderabad to the ancient art of building fishing boats in Gujarat. The book aims to reveal an unknown India.

Terry Darlington’s Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier (Bantam Press) features the quest undertaken by the author and his similarly septuagenarian wife Monica as they popped into a new canal boat and headed north to Liverpool, Lancaster, the Pennines and Wigan Pier. Among the supporting cast are their dogs, Jim (with his broken ear like a flat cap), and Jess (known with good reason as the Flying Catastrophe).

UK folk legend Mike Harding shunts his way into the travel section with The VW Camper Van: A Biography (Aurum). He tells the tale of the vehicle which was invented immediately after the war and became the transport mode of choice for West Coast hippies and Australian surf bums. Sophie Kinghill and Jennifer Westwood’s area of interest is The Fabled Coast: Legends and Traditions from the Seas and Shores of Britain and Ireland (Random House). They ask such questions as: did the monstrous Kraken ever exist? Did a Welsh prince discover America centuries before Columbus? And what happened to the missing crew of the Mary Celeste?