The Boyfriend is Laura Southgate's first book, but it doesn't show. It's a psychologically astute story of a naive 17 year old girl, who falls in love with a damaged and controlling 42 year old man. It's a courageous and honest novel, unsettling, funny and haunting.

David Nicholls is one of those rare things - a popular but also literary authors. Sweet Sorrow is a beautifully observed, nostalgic novel about a teenage boy's first summer love experience. It's evocative, romantic but not cloying, moving and funny. Nicholls really gets it right in this novel, the power of youthful emotion is brilliantly achieved, and the narrative well timed.

The follow up to the award-winning Yorkshire poet's 'Walking Home' about his walk on the Pennine Way, this amusing travel narrative relates his walk on the South West Coastal Path starting in Somerset and ending on the Isles of Scilly off Land's End. The walk passes through Devon and Cornwall: Poldark and Rick Stein territory. It's a notoriously challenging walk along the wild and isolated coast, and Armitage again adopts the nature of a troubadour, giving readings in exchange for food and accommodation.

The subtitle of this book is 'In Patrick Leigh Fermor's footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn'. It's widely known that one of the Twentieth Century's best writers and most compelling figures made his reputation by writing a trilogy about his walk in the 1930s from Holland, across Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Patrick Leigh Fermor's books are essential reading, and Nick Hunt recreates the same journey, using Fermor's books as a guide, and comparing how the intervening 80 years have changed Europe.

Books and TV series about the Thames River seem to be many and varied recently. This must be one of the very best - it's well researched, well written and the author has a personal connection with the river. Her South African parents sailed to London when the author was young, and she spent her teenage years living on their yacht on the river. She traces the river from its origin in Gloucestershire, through the City and finally to the North Sea. Many of the stories she tells are not widely known.

Whiskies Galore carries the subtitle 'A tour of Scotland's Island Distilleries', and in 12 chapters whisky expert Ian Buxton travels through 9 islands reporting hilariously but authoritatively on their whisky making tradition. It's not a thorough inventory of tasting notes and ratings, rather a personal journey to discover what is different and unique, if anything, about island distilleries. It's beautifully and evocatively descriptive of life and landscape on the isolated islands, and Buxton is a well-informed, iconoclastic and articulate companion.