This is the kind of travel book that telescopes the world into a weird continuum, in which the tea-drinking habits of a 13th-century warlord directly impact on the beverages stirred on the set of Brief Encounter. Inspired by these memsahib memories, Goodwin's first overseas expedition was to China and India in search of the origins of char, and he proves an idiosyncratic and nicely unobtrusive guide to the backstreets of Canton and Calcutta. What both had in common was an old-fashioned tea-caddy: one held Assam and Darjeeling, the other Keemun and Lapsang Souchong. Granny Goodwin's cottage was stuffed with ivory elephants and sandal-wood boxes Granny Eileen's damp pig farm was home to Chinese scrolls and jade carvings. Jason Goodwin's grandmothers set him off on the trail of his first travel book. The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels Through India and China in Search of Tea, by Jason Goodwin (Penguin, £7.99)

The book's cri de coeur is a coruscating attack on the gym treadmill: 'a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is nowhere to go'. She details her own experiences of walking during the night in San Francisco, I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis. An admirer of the British tradition of trespass, she gamely admits that the British will always be life's ramblers, never its hikers or trekkers. Self turns to Rebecca Solnits book Wanderlust, which he describes as a 'magisterial history of walking'.

With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction - from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja - Wanderlust offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker.In this self-confessedly amateur history of the subject, she draws links between walking and thinking (Rousseau and Wordsworth), politics (right to roam, reclaim the night) and pilgrimage, both the medieval and modern versions (the walkathon and fundraiser). Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers. What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act.

Wanderlust solnit