Surprise hardback top-seller at specialist travel bookshop Daunt's is Shelby Tucker's tale of a lunatic walk through Burma with Karen guerrillas. Reviewer Maggie Gee is among those who have proclaimed it a classic. Next is another shock, Sarah Quill's reprise of Ruskin's Venice: good to see small publishers getting a slice of pie with these.
Ross King tells how Florence's most famous monument was built; Fergal Keane turns his sharp gaze on the British Isles; another journalist, Fiona Sax Ledger, dissects Africa in her comic travelogue, Mr Bigstuff. Graham Coster's story of the flying boat, Corsairville, has an African angle; Max Hastings's book collects his war reporting over the years. In the Heart of the Sea is the story of the whaleship Essex - inspiration for Moby-Dick - while Notes from an Italian Garden is this month's good-times-in-sun-baked-lands offering.
1 Among Insurgents
Shelby Tucker
(Radcliffe Press, £24.50)
2 Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited
Sarah Quill
(Ashgate, £25)
3 Brunelleschi's Dome
Ross King
(Chatto, £15.99)
4 A Stranger's Eye
Fergal Keane
(Viking, £16.99)
5 Corsairville
Graham Coster
(Viking, £12.99)
6 Motya
Gaia Servadio
(Gollancz, £16.99)
7 Mr Bigstuff and the Goddess of Charm
Fiona Sax Ledger
(Picador, £12.99)
8 Going to the Wars
Max Hastings
(Macmillan, £20)
9 In the Heart of the Sea
Nathaniel Philbrick
(HarperCollins, £16.99)
10 Notes from an Italian Garden
Jan Marble
(Doubleday, £12.99)
Buy it at BOL
