RESULTS IN BOOKS FOR ADULTS

In this volume Iain Sinclair sets out to map the vast stretch of urban settlement outside London bounded by the M25. His long journeys - from the Lea Valley to Uxbridge, from Staines to South Mimms - are flanked by the black clouds of smoke from burning carcasses as the foot and mouth panic takes hold. Here he uncovers a history of forgotten villages, suburban utopias and hellish asylums, now transformed into upmarket housing, all the while walking a disappearing landscape, as the countryside is engulfed by commerce.

Hardeep Singh Kohli loves many things in life - but none more than food. He loves to eat it, he loves to cook it. So when he decided to travel round India in search of his roots, what seemed the obvious thing to take with him? Not a Lonely Planet guide. Not a BBC camera team. No! It was shepherd's pie and Yorkshire pudding. Indian Takeaway is the story of Hardeep's attempts to cook his way round India, dishing up very British meals for the people he meets. How will a Goan garage mechanic, a Delhi socialite or a Mysore hippie cope with fish and chips, or a Full English Breakfast? Will they survive to tell the tale? And will Hardeep find a kitchen to call home?

This volume provides a history of walking, exploring the relationship between thinking and walking and between walking and culture. The author argues for the preservation of the time and space in which to walk in an ever more car-dependent and accelerated world. Featuring profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction - from Wordsworth to Andre Breton's "Nadja", this book aims to offer a provocative examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination and the world around the walker.

Ahdaf Soueif is one of the finest commentators of our time. Her clear-eyed reporting is syndicated throughout the world, and these essays, written between 1981 and the present, are collected here for the first time. They are the direct result of Soueif’s own circumstances of being, as she puts it, "like hundreds of thousands of others: people with an Arab or a Muslim background doing daily double-takes when faced with their reflection in a western mirror". Whether an account of visiting Palestine and entering the Noble Sanctuary, an interpretation of women who choose to wear the veil, or her post-September 11th reflections, these selected essays are always perceptive, fearless, intelligent and necessary.

When Captain Scott died in 1912 on his way back from the South Pole, his story became a myth embedded in the English imagination. Despite wars and social change, despite recent debunking, it is still there. Conventional histories of polar exploration tend to trace the laborious expeditions across the map, dwelling on the proper techniques of ice navigation and sledge travel, rather than asking what the explorers thought they were doing, or why. This book, in contrast, is about the poles as they have been perceived, dreamed of, even desired, and offers a cultural history of a national obsession with polar explorers and mountaineers. It sets out to show how Scott's death in 1912 was the culmination of a long-running national enchantment with perilous journeys to the ends of the earth.

Fed up with working for Time magazine in London, Wendell Steavenson moved to Georgia on a whim. Stories I Stole relates her time there in 20 vodka-fuelled episodes drawn from all over the country - tales of love, friendship and powercuts, of duelling (Georgian style), of horse races in the mountains, wars and refugees, broken hearts, fixed elections, drinking sessions and a room containing a thousand roses.

A brilliant account of a death defying walk through Afghanistan. Rory Stewart's sparsely poetic, and highly acclaimed account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002 has been hailed as a modern classic of travel writing. Travelling entirely on foot and following the inaccessible, mountainous route, Stewart was nearly defeated by the hostile conditions. With the help of an unexpected companion and the generosity of the people he met on the way, however, he survived to report back on a region closed to the world by 24 years of war.

Two thirds of the population in the Middle East are under 25 years old and, though more of them than ever have university degrees, there aren't enough jobs to go round. They're having a collective quarter-life crisis. In the months before turning 25 herself, Allegra Stratton set out to meet them, all of them. She visits Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai, Kuwait City and Damascus - moving with the Middle Eastern ripple of change: Iraq's first post-Saddam elections, Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, Mubarak's decision to hold multi-candidate elections and Kuwait giving women the vote. Instead of youth culture as we know it she discovers a massive video industry of airbrushed, heavily produced, scantily clad singers holds the affections of young Arabs. And there seems to be a contradiction. Many of the fans of these semi-naked popstrels are also very devout. 'Muhajabah' means one who veils. These, then, are the Muhajababes. Allegra gets locked into a painter's studios and sits at the back of Pop Idol auditions; she saves a businesswoman from a fatal spelling mistake and meets the region's most famous single mother. All of them - members of the Muslim Brotherhood and members of sports clubs alike - talk of the same Islamic revival. But though this time it's dressed up as trendy Islam, is it still religious conservativism? When Allegra returns, she discovers the answer to this question may lie closer to home than she thought.

Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and corruption.

What does it mean to be a young Muslim in the 21st century? When Aatish Taseer receives a challenging letter from his estranged father in Pakistan, he decides to set off on an expedition across the Islamic world in search of his own Islamic heritage, as well as to discover how other young people across the Middle East felt about theirs. In a post-9/11 world Aatish is forced to confront himself and his relationship with the religious and secular worlds he moves in, as one of many 'crisis children living on the faultline of Islam and modernity.' He explores issues of identity and religious self-discovery with a fascinating cross-section of people ranging from transvestites in full hijab in Istanbul, and Norwegians considering conversions in Damascus, to Hare Krishnas in Tehran. As he travels, Aatish tells the story of his own family over the past 50 years.