We live in interesting times. The financial crisis is forcing most of us to reign in our travels, yet our wanderlust still champs at the bit. As we make fewer journeys, our appetite for travel stories gallops ahead. So it's timely not only to look back at the best travel books of 2008, but also to note how many of them are written by bold, new voices. We asked leading travel authors to name their favourites.
William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple celebrates a spellbinding first book, Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia (John Murray, £20). His pick of the year is "a fabulously thoughtful, learned, perceptive and stereotype-breaking book which follows the Indus from its delta on the coast of Sindh up to its source in Chinese-occupied Tibet". Dalrymple goes on, "Prophets are rarely recognised in their own family, and as Alice is my kid cousin, who I first met on her travels in a pram, I was initially a bit suspicious of the rave reviews the book garnered over the summer. But when I actually got around to reading the book last week in Sindh, I was blown away. Empires of the Indus is a breathtaking debut by an author who writes enviably cadent and beautiful prose."
Alice Albinia
Alice Albinia herself - now back in the UK - has chosen another debut book, The Man in Seat 61 by Mark Smith (Bantam Press, £12.99) as her favourite of 2008. For her it's "an ideal tome for our post-Bush, environmentally-anxious, crunchy-credit era". She writes, "the book is a straightforward guide to taking the train through Europe, and lays out all the cultural, environmental - and sometimes even economical - reasons for doing so. Skimming along the railroads of the world suddenly seems not just morally-superior (and thus off-putting) but also interesting, easy and fun. I am giving it for Christmas to all the short-haul flight addicts I know."
Rolf Potts
American Rolf Potts is not a new writer, but his work is little known in the UK. He cut his teeth writing not for print-based publications but for the web, and his new book Marco Polo Didn't Go There (Traveler's Tales, £8.99) is the best - and most quirky - post-modern travel-writing "text book" available on either side of the Atlantic. As his Book of the Year, Potts in turn chose The Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle (Drawn and Quarterly, £12.99). Delisle is a gifted Canadian graphic novelist who divides his time between Québec, the Middle East and the less salubrious parts of Asia. Having portrayed the bitter absurdities of life in North Korea, Delisle chronicled his stint with his wife and infant son in Burma. "Delisle's black-and-white line drawings and short vignettes offer a subtly rendered yet engrossing window into the charms, frustrations, and tragedies of life under Rangoon's despotic junta", says Potts. "I like his work in that his writing is very outward looking for a graphic memoir writer yet he has a straightforward, travelogue-style honesty that is sometimes lacking in travel books these days."
Andrew Mueller
For me, Andrew Mueller's I Wouldn't Start From Here (Portobello, £8.99) is a 21st-century original; a fresh, irreverent and jovial jaunt of a guidebook around our baffling modern world. Mueller himself has selected Wizard Of The Nile by Matthew Green (Portobello, 16.99), "a brave and brilliant book animated by a dazzlingly simple idea: what does the worst man in the world actually think he's doing?" Mueller considers it, "a superlative exercise in reporting, deftly leavened with the bleak, black comedy that results when such a fine writer goes disinterring the financial and moral corruptions of any war zone."
Tim Butcher
Africa also holds the attention of Tim Butcher, author of this year's best-selling Blood River (Vintage £ 7.99). Like most journalists, Butcher's career has depended on local guides who don't act simply as translators but also - as he puts it - as gatekeepers and finders of food, water and safety. For him, The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari (Penguin, £8.99) is a book he had always wanted to be written, as it recognises the unsung heroes of countless journalists' adventures. Butcher describes it as "a work of lyrical beauty that takes us on a turbulent journey through the troubled history of Darfur, the desert region of Sudan bedevilled with war. But it is also Hari's own journey as his family are killed and he - a boy of camel-breeding stock - is forced to uproot himself and to adapt to an alien life in Manhattan."
Jeremy Seal
Jeremy Seal, author of several outstanding travel books, is currently writing about Turkey's Meander River. He adored The Bridge by Geert Mak (Harvill Secker, £10). "Like its subject, Istanbul's Galata Bridge, this pocket-sized portrait achieves an extraordinary historical and cultural span. Mak tells of the indigents and hawkers who frequent Istanbul's focal point, and so exposes the brutal realities of urban disenchantment which lurk behind the usual Istanbul platitudes. Turkey, as Mak demonstrates memorably, is riven by cultural, religious and social divisions; the great bridge between east and west totters."
Sara Wheeler
Finally Sara Wheeler, who has just returned from Siberia to write about her fascination with the Arctic, reminds both new and established writers alike of the work of a master. The World is What it Is by Patrick French (Picador, £20), the first volume of his biography of VS Naipaul, is not a travel book, but an analysis of one of the greatest travel writers of our time. "I loved this biography," writes Wheeler. "French conjures an intellectually incorruptible man battling to make sense of it all while failing as a human being, and these pages reveal much about the differences between the travel book and the novel. 'Non-fiction,' Naipaul tells his biographer, 'can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.'"
So will the financial crisis unleash a stampede of popular new travel writing? Perhaps. Certainly the destinations which now capture writers' attentions tend to be in unstable parts of the globe. While their books make thrilling reading, they also give us a sobering picture of the violent, war-torn world we inhabit.
• Rory MacLean's latest book Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India is published by Penguin. His UK top tens Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon are republished by IB Tauris.
