Adventurous Pub Walks in the Chilterns Jean Patefield (Countryside Books, £8.99) Route number three is subtitled The Bluebell Walk and there should be a fine show this weekend on most of the other routes. Each has up-to-date details of a pub conveniently placed halfway round, and instructions for car parking. Some background information seems to be culled from the Internet, but it’s still useful. I was interested to learn, for example, that the Warburg Nature Reserve is named, not after the investment bank as I had always imagined, but after a botanist called Heff Warburg. The walks are about eight miles and go up and down hills. Adventurous? Some people need to get out more.

Map Addict Mike Parker (Collins, £8.99) Parker has been addicted to maps since he was a teenager, stealing Ordnance Survey maps from a shop in Worcester. He grew up to become a travel writer, working for Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. This book is his journey of self-discovery, ending in several attempts to travel without a map or guidebook. His lyrical description of a tour of Eastern Europe ends in Oxford at 3am, where he fortunately finds a large tourist map of the city centre, drawn like the treasure maps of his dreams. It's an engaging meander which will probably mean nothing to those who find walking in the Chilterns adventurous.

The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy Rachel Cusk (Faber, £8.99) Cusk really is adventurous — or mad, depending on your point of view. She and her husband put their Bristol house on the market and took their young children out of school to spend three months in Italy. They are fond of Renaissance art and Italian culture, and take a textbook called Italian In Three Months. You fear it will end in tears, in a splat of toddler tantrums and messy faces, but — astoundingly — Cusk does manage to immerse herself in culture, and produce an intriguing meditation on how travel can lift us out of our everyday life.