In brief: Storm Pegs; Beautiful Days; A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages – review

Jen Hadfield
Picador, £18.99, pp368

In her late 20s, award-winning poet Hadfield made a “pilgrimage” to Shetland, drawn by its mythical reputation as a place on the edge of the world. The reality, she discovered, was vastly different and even harder to resist. In fact, she’s never left, and this magnetic memoir distills her 17-year attempt to answer a simple question: “Where am I?” The archipelago offers mercurial responses but its stormy weather and the precise, practical local language in which she immerses herself leave no room for whimsy. The result is a book as exhilarating as a dip in wild winter waters.

Zach Williams
Hamish Hamilton, £14.99, pp240

Williams, a sometime high-school English teacher whose fiction has already appeared in the New Yorker, debuts with a pensive, artfully of-the-moment short story collection in which danger and farce tussle for dominance. Its backdrop is an America cluttered with jettisoned dreams, where conspiracy theories and delusions fill the void left by exceptionalism. Striving for connection, a cast of fainthearted antiheroes includes a tour guide at an alien contact site and a divorced office worker forced to take a video game live-streamer as a roommate. Expect offbeat lyricism, dreamlike paranoia and more than a hint of horror.

Anthony Bale
Penguin, £10.99, pp464 (paperback)

A featherbed, half a dozen horses, several suits of armour: packing for a trip in the middle ages was a rather more involved process than tossing a swimming costume into a wheelie bag, but plenty about travel back then feels familiar. Package tours, phrase books and saucy souvenirs, for instance. So finds history professor Bale as he plunders accounts of medieval globetrotters, among them traders, soldiers and pilgrims who flocked to the Holy Land and roamed as far afield as China and Ethiopia. Serious scholarship and a sightseer’s unbridled enthusiasm make for fascinating armchair time travel.