Best summer books of 2024: Travel

Everest, Inc: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World by Will Cockrell (Gallery Books)

This month’s 100th anniversary of Mallory and Irvine’s ill-fated attempt on Everest has prompted another rash of books and articles, but can there really be anything left to say? More illuminating is Cockrell’s account of how climbing the world’s highest peak went from being the preserve of professionals on national teams to “dentists from Dallas” paying tens of thousands to be led to the top. Neither photos of the climbing traffic jams, nor the many fatalities, have done anything to stop the growth of an “Everest industrial complex” but Cockrell remains non-judgmental, highlighting the wealth-creation and the way Nepalese, rather than western, guiding companies now dominate the business.

The Half Bird by Susan Smillie (Michael Joseph)

Some will find the breathless style off-putting, but as downshifting memoirs go, this is a doozy. After losing her mother and brother, and suffering a brain haemorrhage in a surfing accident, Smillie quits her job as a journalist in London and sets off alone in her small sailing boat. In Penzance, she makes the impromptu decision not to go north around Britain, but to head south, on an inspiring journey to France, Italy and Greece.

On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain by Oliver Smith (Bloomsbury)

They were banned by Henry VIII but British pilgrimages are making a comeback, perhaps a sign of a yearning for tradition and spiritual meaning in an increasingly digital world. Smith (who writes occasionally for the FT) is an ideal guide, movingly conveying the power of the places he visits — Iona, Lindisfarne, Walsingham and many more — while never getting “woo-woo”. This, he writes, “is a very modern pilgrimage . . . of sacred spaces but also of Welcome Breaks and Ginsters pasties along the way.”

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Wayfarer: Love, Loss and Life on Britain’s Ancient Paths by Phoebe Smith (HarperNorth)

Oliver and Phoebe Smith’s accounts of their pilgrimages around the UK couldn’t be more different. The latter is a candid, personal memoir about overcoming battles with depression, toxic relationships and an eating disorder, in part by treading the “old ways”, from Iona to St Michael’s Mount and Canterbury.

Globetrotting: Writers Walk the World edited by Duncan Minshull (Notting Hill Editions)

The latest in a successful series of anthologies about walking (from the former producer of BBC Radio’s “Book at Bedtime” slot) includes accounts from more than 50 writers and all seven continents. Given how fraught modern travel writing has become, beset by concerns about climate change, overtourism and cultural insensitivity, there is something cheeringly simple in these extracts, from Herman Melville, Edith Wharton and Ernest Shackleton to William Boyd and Helen Garner, about the joy of setting out on two feet.

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