HOW RARE IT IS TO READ a book that is so wise, so timely, so important and so effortlessly mesmerising that you want to tell everyone you know that they simply have to read it. Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart (Faber, £8.99/ offer £8.55) is one.

Hardly a travel guide for the Kuoni set, it’s an account of his personal experiences in Iraq as an administrator with the Coalition Provisional Authority in two provinces, Maysan, formerly the territory of the Marsh Arabs, and Dhi Qar, on the banks of the Euphrates. He had volunteered to help with the task of preventing the region that our schoolbooks called the cradle of civilisation from becoming its graveyard.

The book described the indescribable, the postwar chaos in which the coalition administration issues Utopian policy directives in PC officialese, while every able, moderate official appointed falls victim to brutalised tribal factions obsessed with rationales for slaughter. Stewart is extraordinarily generous to everyone, even the Americans, and his sense of humour is ironic but deadly. Although a record of tragedy, this is not a depressing book.

China has inspired two fine new portraits from writers who have chosen to let its citizens enjoy – or sometimes endure – the new experience of speaking for themselves. Both books have been highly acclaimed as definitive accounts of a world power on the verge of either domination or implosion. Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler (John Murray, £9.99/ £9.49), is an erudite and thoughtful tapestry woven from past and present, history and biography, rural life and migration.

China Road, by Rob Gifford (Bloomsbury, £12.99/ £12.35), is an absorbing cultural trip along Route 312, from Shanghai to Xian, where it turns into the Silk Road and on to the border with Kazakhstan. This was his farewell after 20 years in the country, first as a student and then as a journalist. Conversations with truckers, hookers, karaoke bar hostesses and peasants are interspersed with briefings on the status, politics and past of the country that, he notes, has just overtaken Britain as the world’s fourth largest economy.

The oral history of a small Suffolk village captured rural England in transformation in 1969 when Ronald Blythe’s Akenfieldhit the nerve of pastoral nostalgia. Now Craig Taylor has revisited the territory in Return to Akenfield (Granta, £7.99/£7.59), a book that is a tribute, an update and a fascinating account in its own right of the most marginalised people in England quietly getting on with what’s left of their lives.

As long-haul flights become the choice of the eco-pariah, the travel genre refocuses. How Low Can You Go?, by Tom Chesshyre (Hodder, £10.99/£10.44), is a hilarious record of a low-cost odyssey around the least salubrious corners of Europe.

Pies and Prejudice, by Stewart Maconie, (Ebury, £10.99/£10.44) is another flat-out must read for the summer. Maconie is probably the new Bill Bryson. If he keeps this up he’ll be on the National Treasure list pretty soon. I say this as one who despises most of what lies north of South Mimms and hates nothing more than chippy northern gits.

I’m still not sure how this paen to the North won my heart, but it did. He accuses Liverpool of going on about the Beatles and describes John Lennon’s Imagine as a “glutinous anthem”. His discourse on pies is almost Ciceronian. Did you know that there’s a reference to black pudding in the Iliad? He describes Skelmersdale as “a fork wound around the spaghetti strands of various bewildering traffic systems”, which suggests that his editor was a spellbound as I was.

Iqbal Ahmed’s editor also seems to have been fazed by her author’s storytelling, since Empire of the Mind (Constable, £7.99/£7.59), his companion to the hugely fashionable, London-oriented Sorrows of the Moon, would have been much improved by more attention to the fine grain of the text. Ahmed also seeks individual experience and oral history to assemble a picture of a foreign land; his view is that of the immigrant, whether the Chinese student and Starbucks barista or the millionaire’s son from Muscat at a private college in Oxford. With a curious talent for misperception and a touching but wrongheaded faith in bus timetables, he visits Oxford, Cambridge, Bournemouth, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Hay-on-Wye.

With so much of the world available to us with a flick of the television remote, travellers’ tales are becoming journeys into the invisible spaces of other cultures, their sensibility, their philosophy and their history. Outstanding in this genre of deeper exploration is Ghosts of Spain, by Giles Tremlett (Faber, £8.99/£8.55), a love letter to a country determined to create a glorious future after a traumatic past.

Diana Souhami adds an intriguing personal perspective to the story of the Bounty and its mutineers in Coconut Chaos (Weidenfeld & Nichol-son, £14.99/£13.50).

The good news is that what publishers call “escape books”, accounts of pressing olives or squashing lemons by northern European neo-peasants typified by Peter Mayle, is finally fading into a last, overwritten sunset.

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Celebrity choice: Ben Fogle

SHANTARAM by Gregory David Roberts is not a travel book in the conventional sense, but it is one of the most exciting books I have read. It is set in India and Afghanistan and I felt physically exhausted at the end, as thought I’d lived the entire experience. Never having been to India, it left me, and I’m sure everyone who has read it, wanting to go there on a pilgrimage. An extraordinary read.

Ben Fogle will be presenting Wild on the West Coast on BBC Two in August

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