20 books perfect for travel – be it actual or armchair telegraph.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from telegraph.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
From desert to jungle, acclaimed travel writer Nick Hunt journeys by train and on foot to the ‘outlands’ of the Continent and finds portents of the future.
Baransky volcano on the Kuril Islands, Russia. Photograph: Yuri Smityuk/TASS
Paolo Cognettiâs book Without Ever Reaching The Summit is a powerful evocation of the travellerâs enduring need to be surprised, and it has made me think of a place I want to return to when this is all over: the Kuril Islands in Russiaâs far east, strung like a necklace between Kamchatka and Hokkaido. Soviet historians called them the end of the world but they feel more like the beginning: the haunting mist, the steel-grey ocean scored with pathways of foam, conical volcanoes wrapped in skirts of shimmering jade.