RESULTS IN BOOKS FOR ADULTS

In Britain we claim to know a lot about Indian cuisine - we have London's Brick Lane and Manchester's Curry Mile, and takeaways jostle for space on high streets up and down the country. But what we experience as 'Indian' is just as likely to be Bangladeshi, or British, or a watered-down mixture designed especially for the western palate. Indian cuisine is much more diverse than we might imagine - just as diverse, in fact, as the Indian people themselves. In "Eating India", Bengali food expert Chitrita Banerji takes us on a thrilling journey through a national food formed by generations of arrivals, assimilations and conquests. In her mouth-watering prose, she explores how each wave of newcomers - ancient Aryan tribes, Persians, Middle Eastern Jews, Mongols, Arabs, Europeans - brought innovating new ways to combine the country's rich native spices, poppy seeds, saffron and mustard to the vegetables, fish, grains and pulses that are the staples of the Indian kitchen. She travels across the country, visiting traditional weddings, tiffin rooms, city markets, roadside teaspoon cafes, tribal villages and an industrial size temple kitchen, to find out how India's turbulent history has shaped its people, in particular its cuisine.

Fifteen years ago, Joe Bennett left England for a holiday. Now it's time to come back. But how is the England of his memory different from the England of the motorway? Identikit High Streets, imported cheeriness ('Welcome to Sunny Grimsby!'), chicken tikka, poker machine pubs - things aren't what they used to be. But the longer Joe travels, the more he wonders whether things were ever what they used to be in England. Even a century ago, H. V. Morton, the nation's most celebrated eulogiser, was In Search of England. Criss-crossing the country by varying means of transport and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Joe Bennett delivers a funny and poignant portrait of his homeland - part love letter, part eulogy and part diatribe.

The birthplace of Tolstoy, Lenin and Lev Yashin, notorious for corruption and political intrigues, modern Russia remains an enigma, seeking to throw off its past and realize its true potential. As the country reinvents itself in the post-Soviet era, isolated by language and culture, politics and geography, an absorbing insight into this most extraordinary of nations can be found in the dramatic story of the decline and rise of Russia's football. In Football Dynamo, Marc Bennetts embarks on a quest to find the football managers, oligarchs, players, pundits and fans that define the Russian Premier league, the fastest-growing and most extreme football league in the world. Unwittingly uncovering shocking revelations about racism and hooliganism, but also the true beauty of the game and the nation, Bennetts skilfully decodes the chaos of modern Russia as reflected in its football.

The United States of America is, aw shucks, many things to many people. But to businessman and travel writer Peter Biddlecombe it's FOOD. Huge, vitamin-fortified, artery-clogging, fat-laden, calorie-packed, colonic blocking, microwavable mountains of the stuff. And most of all it's burgers. McBurgers. In his ninth irreverent travel book Biddlecombe chews over the whole of the USA, state-by-state-by-state, as if it was a McHuge McBurger. From the Chicken States of Kentucky and Rhode Island to the Ice State, Alaska, he describes an entire continent whilst imparting a greal deal of practical information.This is arguably the first travel book ever written by anyone who has actually visited every one of the 51 states - and McSurvived.

William Black is serious about Italian food, and in this title he eats whatever gets in his way - expounding the joys of everything from maggot-infested cheese to pasta with donkey sauce. William travels the length and breadth of Italy in his quest for the most delicious and authentic cooking and the very finest ingredients - eating agnolotti in Turin, chasing after rabbits in Ischia and viewing the mattanza, the annual tuna catch, off Siciliy far to the south. One minute he's scoffing eel brodetto, the next he's waxing lyrical about frog risotto.

Japan is the pre-eminent food nation on earth. The Japanese go to the most extraordinary lengths and expense to eat the finest, most delectable, and downright freakiest food imaginable. Their creativity, dedication and ingenuity, not to mention courage in the face of dishes such as cod sperm, whale penis and octopus ice cream, is only now beginning to be fully appreciated in the sushi-saturated West, as are the remarkable health benefits of the traditional Japanese diet. Inspired by Shizuo Tsuji's classic book, 'Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art', food and travel writer Michael Booth sets off to take the culinary pulse of contemporary Japan, learning fascinating tips and recipes that few westerners have been privy to before. Accompanied by with two fussy eaters under the age of six, he and his wife travel the length of the country, from bear-infested, beer-loving Hokkaido to snake-infested, seaweed-loving Okinawa. Along the way, they dine with - and score a surprising victory over - sumos; meet the indigenous Ainu; drink coffee at the dog cafe; pamper the world's most expensive cows with massage and beer; discover the secret of the Okinawan people's remarkable longevity; share a seaside lunch with free-diving, female abalone hunters; and, meet the greatest chefs working in Japan today. Less happily, they trash a Zen garden, witness a mass fugu slaughter, are traumatised by an encounter with giant crabs, and attempt a calamitous cooking demonstration for the lunching ladies of Kyoto. They also ask, 'Who are you?' to the most famous TV stars in Japan. What do the Japanese know about food? Perhaps more than anyone on else on earth, they are judging by this fascinating and funny journey through an extraordinary food-obsessed country.

A surreal view of London's hidden waterways. Since the mid 19th century, most of the tributaries of the River Thames have been buried beneath concrete and brick. Tim Bradford invites you to take a walk with him along the routes of these forgotten rivers. The journey is interspersed with the author's philosophy on such life and death matters as jazz, football, Dickens and jellied eels and some trivial concerns such as capitalism, politics, death and dreams. Complete with the cartoons and maps that are Tim Bradford's trademark, this book should prove an entertaining tour through a not so familiar terrain.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Sweden's social democratic model was the envy of every country in Western Europe. From the outside, at least, it appeared to be a prosperous, generous, egalitarian country that took care of its employees, operated a wide-ranging welfare system and offered shelter to immigrants, from Iran and the Middle East to the former Yugoslavia and Chile. It had a stable industrial economy that prized energy conservation and the environment. How could it fail? Andrew Brown lived there as a child in the 1960s. Ten years later, he returned: he married a Swedish woman and worked in a timber mill, raising his small son, first of all in a housing estate on the edge of Gothenberg, and then in a makeshift chalet in the forest. Fishing was his passion and his escape from a country and its people that alternately oppressed and fascinated him. He returned to live in England at the beginning of the 1980s, but he kept going back. This book tells his story, and woven into it is the landscape of Sweden, its rivers and forests with their attendant mythology, as well as the workings of a political and social system that seemed, for a decade or so, to have made Sweden into a modern utopia.

Weaned on maps, educated by maps, surrounded by maps and ever so slightly in love with maps, Guy Browning presents a selection of intriguing and quirkily annotated cartographic gems to chart his unsteady progress from pewling toddler to pewling young man via the furthest corners of the Alps, Niagara Falls, the Mediterranean, Central America and darkest Chipping Norton. Maps of My Life revisits the richly comic highways, byways and unpaved tracks of Guy's unusually peripatetic early years, peopled with unforgettable relatives, friends and foe such as the Fatted Calf, the Sainted One, Langton Machoko and Marshal LaPoulette...

A brilliant, fearless journalist who knows huge areas of the Islamic world intimately, Burke now turns to the wider question of how we are to get to grips with radical Islam and what it really means. Burke has travelled all over the great arc of Islamic land, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, and he uses this in his new book to great effect to show how various and completely unmonolithic Islam really is, and how the sort of standard Western generalisations about it are both stupid and dangerous.