Travel books

Sue Perkins tackles grief via her travels, plus all the latest releases

East of Croydon Sue Perkins Penguin Michael Joseph, £20 Some people are born to travel, greeting every new horizon with glee and every bump in the road with steel-jawed resolve. There’s a very good chance you – brave Wanderlust reader – are one of those people. Sue Perkins, however, is not of your kind.

The former Bake Off presenter finds herself out of her depth on a journey from Vietnam to China along the Mekong and then following the Ganges down from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. With a set of life skills not entirely suited to filming in some of the planet’s nittiest and grittiest regions, these misadventures deliver laughs aplenty with the chaotic Perkins often making colourful digressions.

But as witty, urbane and self deprecating as she is – and the notion of ‘media dilettante abroad’ might raise the odd hackle – she’s also engaged with the places, politics and, crucially, the people of these troubled stretches of messy humanity, and presents them as honestly as she does her own travel failings. Confronted with the raw reality of unthinkable poverty, undrinkable water and Asia’s ‘unsentimental’ approach to livestock, you can feel her anger and conflict churn away.

Typically, while her travels are framed by the downward-turn of her father’s health back home, there’s no neat resolutions to be found in these murky waters, just the odd reflection. Sue Perkins may not have been born to travel, but East of Croydon is all the more enjoyable, interesting and often moving for it.