Travel writing comes in many forms, but is always about searching, observing and coming to an understanding of the world. Sometimes the hardest search is the one for a good book, but this year you need look no further than Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Review £8.99), a staggeringly good book that should draw crowds to the travel shelves. Mehta was born in Calcutta and has lived in New York, London and elsewhere, but the place he loves is Bombay, and Maximum City is his declaration. Long, complex and entirely captivating, it mixes travelogue, memoir and reportage in a book that fizzes with energy, curiosity, wonder, disgust and love.

If Mehta’s vision sounds too racy, then try Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City (Faber £16.99). This, too, is an elegy to a city, another declaration of love — this time to the Istanbul of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when yalis (waterside mansions) burnt, the military ruled and the place was wreathed in melancholy.

Pamuk breathes life into Istanbul with beautiful descriptions of the Bosphorus and the city’s old alleys. This December, he will stand trial, accused of denigrating Turkish identity by referring to the 1915-17 Armenian genocide. His book provides sufficient evidence to have the charge thrown out of court.

Travel and biography have long been happy book-mates and one of the most successful practitioners, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, has produced one of the year’s best travel books. His previous offering, the award-winning Travels with a Tangerine, saw him following the great Arab traveller Ibn Battutah from his native Morocco to the edge of Asia. The Hall of a Thousand Columns (J Murray £20), the second of a trilogy, takes the duo across India, from Delhi down to Kerala. Mackintosh-Smith is unrivalled at slipping between past and present, between the modern country and the glorious, bloody, Muslim-ruled India of the 14th century. In Edge of the Orison (H Hamilton £16.99), Iain Sinclair performs the same magic, but closer to home when he follows John Clare, the 19th-century “peasant poet”, from Essex to Northamptonshire. Readers of Sinclair’s previous outing, around the M25, will know of his penchant for walking and of his unique writing style, with its loosely structured but tightly packed prose. Clare took fewer than four days to compete this walk. Sinclair finds enough to interest and delight us over almost 400 surprising pages.

Clare also has a walk-on part in Findings (Sort Of Books £6.99), the Forward prize-winning poet Kathleen Jamie’s account of travelling around her native Scotland. There is no unifying journey here, but a collection of stories or essays in which the author is the link. Jamie is such an acute observer, interpreting everything she sees with such sympathy and writing with such beauty, that she conjures wonder in unlikely places — her husband’s illness and a Scottish winter night among them. Philip Marsden’s Chains of Heaven (HarperCollins £14.99) is set in the even more remote Ethiopian highlands. On his first visit, in the 1980s, he had hoped to visit Tigray and the ancient capital of Aksum, but was stopped by the Marxist regime. Marsden has now returned to complete that journey, trekking across the mountains. The walk is tough, the landscape spectacular but most memorable are the tales of wonder he collects along the way.

Michela Wrong brings us a different sort of story from neighbouring Eritrea. I Didn’t Do It for You (Fourth Estate £8.99) mixes reportage, travel writing and history to explain, in the words of the subtitle, “how the world used and abused a small African nation”. It sounds dry, but Wrong is such a good writer she could make even the dullest of subjects readable. The poet Ruth Padel displays a similar talent in Tigers in Red Weather (Little, Brown £17.99). Shattered by the end of a relationship, Padel found herself with an affinity for big cats: “Tigers were about surviving, alone.” In the same way that William Fiennes retrieved his love of life by following the migration of snow geese, Padel rediscovers her freedom by tracking tigers across Asia. She isn’t a natural hunter, but that’s not the point, for what she captures is the beauty and passion of the places she visits and the special hold the tiger has on our imaginations. Elsewhere in Asia, Ilija Trojanow was just as perceptive in his journey from the icy source to the hot mouth of India’s principal river. Along the Ganges (Haus £12.99) is part of the new, handsomely produced Armchair Traveller series of foreign travel-writing in translation. Trojanow, a Bulgarian, writes in German, but his elegant prose has more than survived translation. His view from the holy river of India with its glories and poverty, its daily grind and lavish festivals, new technology and old ways will fascinate.

The slew of books about living abroad has hardly abated, but the quality has declined. An exception is Matthew Parris’s A Castle in Spain (Viking £17.99), in which the political commentator falls for a large rundown house in remote Catalunya and talks his family into getting involved. Instead of moving abroad, Tarquin Hall sets himself up in the unfamiliar surroundings of London’s East End. In Salaam Brick Lane (J Murray £16.99) he brings a sharp eye and dry humour to his descriptions of living in a community of Bangladeshis, Indians, Somalis and Pakistanis, Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews. Only in London . . .

Finally, as another year closes with British and American troops still in Iraq, publishers Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson have persuaded a sparkling array of talent to describe their Meetings with Remakable Muslims (Eland £18.99). William Dalrymple, Jason Elliott, Philip Mansel and Tahir Shah are among the luminaries in a collection that shows how varied vibrant and relevant travel writing can be.

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Top five

MAXIMUM CITY by Suketu Mehta
Review £8.99
The author’s homage to the city fizzes with energy and is completely captivating

ISTANBUL by Orhan Pamuk
Faber £16.99
Novelist’s declaration of love to the Istanbul of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

CHAINS OF HEAVEN by Philip Marsden
HarperCollins £14.99
Beautifully told tales of a journey to Ethiopia’s remote highlands

TIGERS IN RED WEATHER by Ruth Padel
Little, Brown £17.99
Jaded writer rediscovers her freedom and love of life by tracking tigers across Asia

FINDINGS by Kathleen Jamie
Sort Of Books £6.99
Poet’s beautifully observed account of travellling round Scotland

Bestsellers

1 Coast by Christopher Somerville (BBC) 50,340

2 Himalaya by Michael Palin (Weidenfeld) 30, 211

3 Long Way Round by Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman (Time Warner) 27,980

4 Around the World in 80 Treasures by Dan Cruickshank (Weidenfeld) 26,187

5 Geldof in Africa by Bob Geldof (Century) 21,038

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