Fly Europe
The Complete Guide to Budget Airline Destinations by Katie Wood (Aurum Press £12.99, 17 April)
The no-frills sector is one of the most dynamic in the travel industry, so it's no surprise to find this book, which includes details of defunct airline Buzz, is already out of date before it hits the shelves this week. The book does have some useful information on 80 European destinations, set out in an easy-to-read format, including how to get from the sometimes far-out airports to the city centre. But do we really need to read repeatedly that 'there are plenty of banks throughout the city where money can be changed into euros'? What is needed is less space on sometimes inane generalisations and more detail, especially on things to do just outside the city centres - it seems unthinkable that the book mentions Reims without talking about the champagne capital in Epernay and the famous Dom Perignon, and Bordeaux with such a fleeting reference to the surrounding vineyards that you have no idea how to go about visiting Chateau Mouton Rothschild, surely one of the highlights of any winelover's visit.
Stylecity London
(Thames & Hudson, £14.95)
Launching a new line in travel books from the publishers of the Hip Hotel guides, StyleCity London provides a colourful, lively and fresh guide to the hip side of the capital. The book is divided into two cross-referenced sections, 'Street Wise' and 'Style Traveller'. The former is a guide to seven of London's most distinctive and lively areas, from Notting Hill to City, Kings Cross to Bermondsey. Beautifully illustrated with glossy colour photographs the choices are diverse, combining the classic with the ultrachic: antiques at Portobello Market; oysters at Bibendum; handbags at Lulu Guinness; a wet shave at Trumpers. A map of each area allows you to wander, although at a thickish 7 x 8 inches the book is a little unwieldy. The 'Style Traveller' section identifies London's 'most pleasurable places' in five sections - 'sleep', 'eat', 'drink', 'shop' and 'retreat' - so you'll never be at a loss to find Blahniks, Boateng or the Blue Bar. The only sections missing from this fine book are on how to get a table at Claridge's and how to get a second job to afford it all. A Paris guide is also out tomorrow, while Barcelona and New York will get the StyleCity treatment in September.
The Amazon
by Roger Harris and Peter Hutchison (Bradt, £14.95)
The magical Amazon region, known as the 'Green Hell' to early European visitors, has been given the Bradt travel guide treatment in a book that is of equally high intellectual and practical value. This fully updated second edition describes every aspect of travel in a region that surrounds the surging arterial waters of the world's greatest river. From its source 5,168m high in the Peruvian Andes the Amazon collects water from more than 1,100 tributaries as it flows 6,448km through the mountains, cloudforest and rainforests of an area larger than the whole of western Europe, to the Atlantic. Special sections cover health, transport, expeditions, indigenous tribes, and the incredibly diverse flora and fauna: much of it exclusive to the area. If the graphic depictions of tropical diseases, poisonous spiders and the effects of curare poisoning don't put you off, the guide has expanded sections on the national parks, tours, lodges, restaurants and attractions in all nine countries of the Amazon basin. New to this edition is an appendix of internet resources. It is vital to prepare well for travel in this most unpredictable of landscapes and this guide is a great place to start.
Return to Paris
A Memoir With Recipes by Colette Rossant (Bloomsbury £12.99, 5 May)
This seems to be the latest trend in writing - memoirs peppered liberally with recipes for dishes mentioned in the prose. It is a combination that in this case hangs together well. The memoirs make charming reading, telling of 15-year-old Colette, who moves reluctantly to Paris from Egypt with a flighty mother, who abandons her to live with her bossy grandmother and her stranger of an older brother. The lonely teenager finds solace with cook Georgette and falls in love with good French food.
It is the paste which glues the important events of her life together, from her first taste of a truffle in a Michelin-starred restaurant with her new stepfather to the tomato salad she made when she met the teenager who was to become her husband. So it seems fitting that scattered through the book are recipes for dishes such as Georgette's French toast and the deep-fried tiny fish caught on holiday by the coast.
This book is neither sophisticated in its language nor its recipes but its simplicity grows on you. It is well worth ploughing through a disappointing first chapter which tries clumsily to fill in the gaps for anyone who has not read the first part of Colette's story told in Apricots On The Nile. This is a book for Francophiles and for anyone else who wants to make simple food well. Just don't, whatever you do, read it when you're hungry.
