21 books like Journeys to the Other Side of the World

In some travel writing, animals may be mentioned only in passing and are poorly observed, not so in this superbly written, sumptuous book. It is rich with icy imagery or steamy tropical atmosphere but there is humour, and how impressive that this successful wildlife cameraman and talented writer is so self-effacing. He seriously underplays the risks he faces, like his instructions if bitten by a seal on Bird Island: ‘Clean out the wound as much as you can with a scrubbing brush… and hope it is nowhere important… if it is really bad we’d have to radio for a ship to come and get you, but that could take weeks.’

Brilliant from beginning to end. I was totally immersed.

This is another absolute gem of a book: about the English countryside and its wildlife. It is atmospheric, evocative, authoritative, informative, fascinating, closely observed, and well-researched. It is sobering too though about how intensive agriculture is destroying our natural heritage, and it is food for thought for those of us who enjoy travelling to enjoy wildlife tourism when the key species in our own back yards are struggling so.

Lewis-Stempel is a lyrical writer: ‘Up on those dark but heavenly hills skylarks sang, otters swam in the brook, and polecats eyed up the chickens. Where our friend lived was beautiful, but as life-full as a cemetery. Someone had removed all the birds.’

This wonderful piece of writing isn’t obviously a travel narrative or a book about natural history as it is marketed as a children’s fiction but it is based on a real event and the sense of place the author achieves is astonishing. A group of men and boys from St Kilda are put ashore on a rocky stac in the North Atlantic. Their mission is to harvest birds and collect fulmar eggs and oil which will sustain their little rural community through the harsh Scottish winter. No one comes to bring them home though and the unfortunates spend months huddled against the storms.

The narrative vividly captures the risks such adventurers took dangling from homemade ropes over cliffs above unforgiving seas with shearwaters and other seabirds screaming at them. It is a masterful portrait of the harsh life on the Scottish islands.

Clare is another consummate wordsmith – he even managed to write an engaging book about spending months on container ships – but with Orison he manages to weave a fascinating story using beautiful prose and superb writing to bring intelligent discussions and good research to life while introducing us to key conservation personalities he meets during his journeys.
Clare sets out to search for the highly endangered and secretive slender-billed curlew in a range of wetlands in a troubled Eastern Europe and discovers inspiring if sometimes eccentric movers and shakers devoted to saving our wild places.
And how about this for a profound final sentence in a book: ‘Too much certainty is a miserable thing, while the unknowable has a pristine beauty and a wonder with no end.’

I think the librarian at Alice Springs Hospital in the Australian Northern Territory ordered this by mistake. It is about Canadian First Nations, not Australian ones. I read it when I was working there as an intern back in the 1990s and bought my own copy to keep forever.

Any modern doctor will be either working in a colonized land or meeting patients who have known oppression and/or dispossession and are, therefore, suffering from the effects of that trauma, often passed down the generations. This book opened my eyes to a totally different way of seeing right and wrong, of judging—or not judging—community sexual, alcohol, or drug abuse.

I worked with remote area Aboriginal people in Australia and with many tribes in African countries, and the perspective this book gave me allowed me to be effective in ways I would otherwise have missed.

This heart-wrenching historical novel won the prestigious Costa Book of the Year award. Set in 1867 in Dove River, a tiny settlement in the Northern Territory, this tale is told by several narrators. Often, that technique is used ineffectively, but Penney has made each voice so distinct that the book transcends the genre of murder mystery to become a reflection upon how people perceive the same event very differently. When Mrs. Ross discovers the murdered body of the trapper Laurent Jammett, her worst nightmare comes true: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and has been named the primary suspect. Searchers set out from Dove River, following his tracks across the snow, ultimately discovering the truth behind the murder. This tale compellingly explores themes of justice and redemption. 

A must for all bug lovers (as well as those who need convincing)! This is a sweet book with a traditional feel to the illustrations, and the only rhyming book on my list. I love it because it captures a child’s perspective on the world so beautifully. It has great messages about enjoying the outside world and making a difference no matter how small you are. There are fun fact pages too about various minibeasts!

A photograph gives me the form of the bird, but it remains up to me to see the bird as a bird. And that can be difficult. What do we see when we see a bird? 

The Peregrine, J. A. Baker’s masterpiece of descriptive prose, provides an answer, an answer that is as much about how we see as it is about what we see when we see birds. Sometimes we pull ourselves into the sight of others and the world emerges as more than its light. We see by being seen.

Baker achieves this kind of seeing both in his efforts to see a pair of peregrines and in his description of this achievement. 

It’s hard to ignore the personal testimony of Sir David Attenborough, based on 70 years of exploring and documenting the natural world. Like Attenborough’s films, this is a masterpiece in storytelling and making science and nature accessible. This has been his enduring legacy. But this book is different. Here, he combines a severe warning about the breakdown in the web of life with hopeful solutions aimed at rewilding the land and oceans. His message is clear: we can turn the precipitous decline of life on earth due to human impacts; but we need to act fast and at scale. I especially like how he distills the essence in a quote that says: “in this world, a species can only thrive when everything else around it thrives too.”

One-stop shopping on the recent history of unwanted (by people) plants.

Though Mabey does not delve far into the past, his treatment of how colonialism in the past two centuries re-shaped the botanical landscape of the entire planet is comprehensive. He is particularly good on islands, where "invasive" plants arrived and thrived with shocking regularity as European and other ships created denser transcontinental connectivity.

He proves that modernity and its technologies did not fix the ongoing human incapacity to control vegetation, but if anything, left us with a bigger and more hybrid botanical mixture.