Time-Out European Breaks by Budget Airline

With no-frills airlines spreading their tentacles throughout Europe, there couldn't be a better time to bring out a guide dedicated to all those strange-sounding places you can now travel to for the price of a pizza. Its colour magazine format makes you want to pick it up and flick through it. And, like the flights, it's a bargain at £4.99.

This guide not only tells you what there is to see at 80 destinations, it also tells you which airline goes there, how to get from the (sometimes remote) airport to your destination and where to eat and sleep.

With only a page dedicated to each place, information gaps are inevitable. For instance, the section on Caen ignores the fact that one of the best reasons to go there is for its proximity to Bayeux with its famous Tapestry, but seems to think it essential that the traveller knows the name of the town's two main roads.

Jane Knight

The Gap Year Guidebook 2002/03

Though not stylishly laid out, this book is ideal for students planning to take a year off. With 10 editions under its belt, the publisher knows what it's doing and it shows. This practical and comprehensive book guides gappers through university applications, deferral of study and exam retakes, and is full of ideas on how to spend a gap year here or abroad.

Best of all is the list of more than 50 organisations that arrange voluntary work overseas. Students can map the movements of a hippopotamus population in Malawi, teach orphans in the Himalayan foothills, set out on a scientific expedition to the Arctic or track turtles in the Caribbean.

Also helpful are extensive contact details, including lists of potential employers, universities, foreign embassies in the UK and colleges where students can brush up on their work skills. Dense with detail, the chapters are peppered with personal experiences of former gappers - 'bra-less with worms' for example, makes for entertaining reading.

The book is linked to a website - www.gap-year.com - which is regularly updated. The guide's only drawback is that it is mainly geared towards school leavers. It is a shame it does not embrace the development of the gap year as a phenomenon that appeals to all ages.

Sandra Cole

Baggage

Emily Barr has followed up her debut novel, Backpack, with this engaging thriller. Pregnant heroine Daisy thinks she has escaped her murky British past by settling with a husband and child in the Australian outback. Suddenly, it catches up with her in the shape of backpacking best friend, Sophie, and her muckraking journalist boyfriend, Larry: Loyalties, relationships and mental stability are all stretched to breaking point.

Travel is portrayed as a method of escaping one's identity and the question is raised as to whether taking a year out from the grim reality of professional London life - or even moving to Australia for a decade - can override the ties of your past. It also dwells on the ethics of friendship, marriage, child-rearing and responsibility.

Barr's characterisation is a mixture of subtle insight and overblown stereotyping. Her portrayal of Larry as a selfish, immature, soulless husk of a human is a cliché straight from the Hunter S. Thompson school.
Tom Templeton