Spitsbergen comes to life in Michelle Paver‘s Dark Matter. The reader is with Jack Miller in his first enthralling encounter’s with the island in the summer. With him, too, we are left alone in the terrifying bay of Gruhuken when his partners in the expedition, Gus and Algie, have to leave because of a medical emergency.

Jack is poor and desperate for a change and leaps at the chance to become the wireless operator on the expedition that is to spend a year in the bay. With him, we get to know Spitsbergen, we learn to love the dogs and Isaak in particular and we witness the departure of the sun and the arrival of the winter where there will be fierce storms and nothing but occasional moonlight for four months.

We are with Jack, too, as he realizes that the ghostly figure that he sees really is threatening him and attempting to reclaim Gruhuken. The story is spellbinding and chilling and told in beautifully evocative language. It is difficult to put this novel down.

Michelle Paver is the author of the Chronicles of Dakness series for children. She is just as accomplished as a writer for adults.

During a recent stay in the Pyrenees, in the gite L’Escolan, at Ustou, which Jean Charles and Pauline (the hosts at the Refuge de la Loge in Crozet for the past few years) have newly taken over, we were given the little booklet that the French government wants tourists to read: Les Pyrenees avec l’ours.

You don’t need a booklet to alert you to the high feelings of the local population about the re-introduction of the almost extinct population of brown bears into the region. Be warned, if you visit the area, you are wise to express no opinion. If you are in favour of the twenty or so bears that now roam the higher meadows and forests, you will be shouted down by the sheep or goat farmers. (There are nearly 700,000 sheep present in the Pyrenees in summer). The farmers have to prove that it was a bear that devoured their lamb or kid before receiving compensation.

Express hostility to the project (four more females and a male bear captured in Slovenia were released as recently as 2006) and you will be howled down by the ecologists who will tell you that the brown bear is part of the cultural heritage of the Pyrenees and that the project has brought employment to the area and the reinforcement of protective measures for the flocks, like the spread of the Pyrenean mountain dogs as shepherd dogs.

Whichever way you feel, it cannot be denied that the issue has caught the imagination of the people of the region and is certainly a tourist attraction.

If you have ever visited Germany and been surprised at the curious mixture of past and present that is around you almost everywhere, then this book will interest you. Germania, A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern was published by Picador in 2010.

If you intend to visit Germany, this book will provide an interesting account of at least one thing to eat, look at or visit in the area to which you are going.

The author has distilled his many years of visiting into what might be looked on as a sort of  ’travelling companion’, revealing Germany to be a place of extraordinary diversity and eccentricity. His book is sure to surprise you and make you laugh, as well. And if you have never thought of visiting Germany, perhaps thinking of it as a rather dull and over-organised place, this book might well change your mind.

You will be introduced to some of the finer points of German cuisine (‘there’s always a pig or a potato around the next corner, but there is a lot to be done with these two life forms’), as well as some of the country’s culture and history, which is anything but dull!

When I wrote about North Korea (Nothing to Envy: Barbara Demick, Real Lives in North Korea) six weeks ago, several people reminded me that there are similar areas of the world that are still frozen in the middle of the last century. Isadora Tattlin’s Cuba Diaries is about four years spent in one of those countries where the local inhabitants will queue for hours for an item that has briefly reappeared on the market, and where individual enterprise is quashed.

With her husband and two children, she is posted to Havana and spends four years getting to know Cubans, eating in the paladars, seeing the poverty of her house staff and travelling to areas where the hotel has no light, or no water, or very little palatable food.

This is an intriguing insight into Fidel Castro’s Cuba – he even came to dinner! – that describes the period when ‘el triunfo de la revolucion‘ is giving way, at last, to the need for tourism and a more open eye on the world. Isadora Tattlin even visits the first tourist liner that docks in Havana.

She concludes with the story of the US/Cuba clash over the fate of little Elián Gonzáles, the five-year-old who was found off the coast of Miami and fought over by his relatives before ultimately being returned to his Cuban father. As we certainly do, she wonders what the future holds for him and the Cuban nation.

The story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s desperate rush to the South Pole and of the death of the polar team through cold and starvation on the return journey is well known. Clive Powell-Willians’ Cold Burial recounts an equally ill-calculated journey at the other end of the earth.

Edgar Christian was eighteen years old when he accompanied his cousin, Jack Hornby, and Hornby’s moody friend, Harold Adlard, on an ill-prepared venture into the frozen Canadian north.

They had learned nothing from Scott’s failure, and, like Scott failed to take the essential dogs. With wild idealism, they based their hope of survival on the chance of encountering the migrating caribou herds and living off their meat.

The gruesome story of their failure is told in the journal Edgar Christian, a document that survived their death and was found, with their three bodies, in a log cabin two years later. The document was kept in the archives of Dover College and came into the hands of Clive Powell-Williams who has used it to construct a beautifully written narrative illustrated with original photographs.

When the second sentence of a book contains the words ‘laying in bed’, you can’t help but wonder what sort of writer and proof reader produced it. Mike Carter’s Uneasy Rider continues in the same casual language for 352 pages.

However, the writer changes. He starts his narrative the morning after the Observer newspaper Christmas party when he is newly divorced, smarting and consciously fending off a mid-life crisis, at the age of 42. He learns that, in his cups the night before, he has made the rash promise that he will take off on a large motorcycle. He has never ridden one in his life but the kudos his declaration is earning makes it difficult to back out.

We follow him through northern Europe and Scandinavia, to Finland and Latvia, Poland, Turkey, even Albania and we share his sexual adventures – or failures. Invariably, he is warned that the next country is dangerous or unwelcoming. And, sometimes, it is! He travels almost 20,000 miles through 27 countries and makes friends and enemies along the road. We get an inside view of the motorcycling fraternity.

At first, the protagonist seems brash, angry and not very fond of himself but, by the end of his narrative, he has found his equanimity and we learn to like him. This is not only a travel story; it is also a record of personal growth and victory over a man’s mid-life crisis.

Peggy Elliott’s A Small Part of History combines a historical journey along the Oregon Trail in 1845, with an emotional exploration of family relationships.

Twenty-seven year-old Rebecca Springer is newly married to John Springer and stepmother to his families by his two former wives, four boys and a teenage girl. She has no choice but to accompany him when he announces his intention to cross the USA in a wagon train to Oregon.

We read excerpts from her diary and hear the narrative voices of Rebecca and her rebellious step-daughter, Sarah, as the pioneers are slowly reduced in numbers, possessions and hopes.

The journey is a dreadful one across swollen rivers and through deserts and prairies and into the mountains. Faced with searing heat and deadly cold, Rebecca and Sarah are drawn together by the hardship they experience.

This moving novel, published in 2008 by the Headline Publishing Group, gives an original, female view of the historic journey taken by so many pioneers.

Teenagers, it seems, are frequently not enthusiastic about reading.

A parent of teenagers commented to me this week that part of the problem lies in the density of the examination programmes we impose on them. They simply do not have time to give to a long story. Short Internet summaries often suffice. They write their examinations with no real pleasure in the texts they have not even read.

Perhaps the solution lies in a delightful, short, comic novel. Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is just that.

A twelve-year old could love every minute of the action-packed story of Sampath Chawla, a bored post-office clerk who has failed at every step of his life and takes to the trees, only to be hailed as a guru. The monkeys join him as they find life easier eating the gifts of his acolytes than stealing peanuts outside the cinema.

The family is worried about the consequences – their image and the marriage-prospects of their children. Yet Kulfi, the enchanting, rather unusual mother, understands and supports her son.

How could Desai possibly draw this lovely fable to an end? And yet she does, in a totally satisfactory way.

The story works on many levels and is a rewarding dip into Indian culture with a rich note of satire. It is no surprise that it won the 1998 Betty Trask Prize.

Glamour claims that Body Surfing (2007) is one of Anita Shreve’s finest works yet. The Pilot’s Wife and Light on Snow certainly compete for that label and both would be difficult to emulate.

The Pilot’s Wife was particularly successful with its almost prophetic story of a pilot unwittingly carrying the bomb that destroyed his 747. It was made into a television film.

It is in the second part that Body Surfing becomes a real page-turner. Sydney, who is tutoring a troubled teenager, becomes the object of attraction for both the older sons of her well-to-do employers and the cause of conflict – so much so that Ben, the older one, will not even attend her wedding to Jeff. The wedding becomes a disaster.

From this point, the story is gripping and we feel we really know the gentle and wise father and the lovely daughter. Even the hostile mother is a careful and realistic portrait of a disturbed mother.

Anita Shreve again writes of the New Hampshire coast which she has so graphically evoked in the past. We are absorbed in the summers on the beach that Sydney experiences. This is a highly recommended summer read.

Prague is undoubtedly one of the loveliest European cities to visit now that inter-city flights have become so viable. We were astounded to see workmen (and workladies!) returning the city to its former beauty not just all day long but right through the night hours when we had a long Easyjet weekend there.

It is Prague of 1942 that is so hauntingly evoked in Mark Slouka’s The Visible World. The narrator who has grown up in New York, makes his own journey to Prague, in search of his parents’ past.

The nostalgia of the first section of the story is movingly recreated in beautiful language. A brief intermezzo presents the fruitless search for the Prague of the narrator’s origins. With him, we move through the modern Czech landscape.

It is the final section ’1942, A Novel’ that is totally gripping. This is a beautiful love story set against a chilling background of occupation and atrocity. As the narrator was unable to recover the past, he recreates it using the horrifying real events of 1942. A dreadful story is told in exquitiste language.

This is a novel to read and re-read. I found it in a 2008 Portobello paperback edition.