Best of the rest

Hidden Places Sarah Baxter White Lion Publishing, £15

What is a hidden place? It’s a question we ask ourselves a lot, but it seems as though travel journalist and longtime regular Wanderlust contributor Sarah Baxter has the answer. Taking us on a wild – and charmingly illustrated – sojourn through 25 obscure locations, Sarah exposes the places we never knew we needed to be. Flip through the artful pages to find secret citadels only reached by foot, the jungle-covered belly of the Mayan underworld, underwater ruins in the Pacific and phantoms in Germany’s Black Forest. It’s a book to help you plan your next adventure – just don’t spread the word.

Gibbous Moon over Lagos Pamela Watson Hardie Grant, £15

Out of the villages and into the city is the order of the day for author Pamela Watson, who returns to Africa in a follow-up to her memoir of cycling down the continent’s rural backroads. Following her dream to set up a social enterprise in Nigeria’s largest city, she finds challenges at every corner, but adventure, too – sunny getaways to the Badagry Creek beach havens, thrilling rescues from the floodplains of the Niger River and tense paper chases with the Nigerian police. But despite being tried and tested, her hope for the future still waxes strong in this tribute to booming Lagos.

The Frozen River: Seeking Silence in the Himalaya James Crowden Harper Collins, £17

It’s not often that you get the chance to remove yourself from the rest of the world and live alongside a remote Himalayan mountain community. But in 1976, army officer James Crowden left the military behind in order to do just this, travelling to the wilderness of the northern Himalaya to immerse himself in the life of the Zangskari people. Butter traders travelling down the frozen river Leh, villagers in Padum and chanting Buddhist monks bring this epic memoir to life, as James takes us back to a time before mass-tourism existed. What he finds is more than a land of snow and ice, but a place where time stands still, made all the more magical by its solitude. An inspiring look into a world remarkably unaffected by modern life.