Voyageur: Across the Rocky Mountains in a Birchbark Canoe by Robert Twigger

The premise is this: on a visit to the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, Twigger sees an Algonquin birchbark canoe. He thinks he wants one. Then he decides he’d like to paddle one along the route that, in the 1790s, Alexander Mackenzie followed from Fort Chipewyan (in modern-day Alberta) to the Pacific Ocean as he explored the land for its fur trade potential. Unfortunately, the route runs against the current.

Over three summers, Twigger and his ragtag bunch of mates (who rarely make the mistake of travelling with him twice and, when they do, they regret it) paddle, tow and portage their canoe upriver. Their story is a compelling one. Twigger doesn’t shy from relating the minutae – the arguments, the drugs, the arrests, the mosquitoes and bears, and the unfortunate but hilarious propensity that Dave has for mislaying his shoes (he ends up losing all three pairs and has to travel barefoot). The result is a fabulous, self-deprecating and very funny story about a group of men having a generally horrible time for no very good reason at all.

The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

This is a really beautiful book that’s as much about home as away. Convalescing from illness Fiennes re-reads Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, to which he had been introduced at school, and is transported by its story. As his health improves, he resolves to follow the snow geese’s migration: each year millions of these birds travel from their wintering grounds in the southern United States and the north of Mexico to the Arctic islands of north-east Canada. And so he flies to Houston.

Fiennes is one of those writers whose descriptions so delicately detailed that you can almost hear the flapping of a million wings. Even the simple and mundane are intimately and graciously depicted. But there’s more to this book than brilliant evocations of travel. As Fiennes moves further north, he sinks into a melancholy homesickness – strangely for one who went to boarding school from the age of eight. And so his observations become introspective: at the same time as reconnecting with the world after his illness, he delves into his own feelings, family ties and sense of home, into the books he reads as he waits for the geese, and the medical history of homesickness. The result is a dextrous blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and a moving, involving tale.

The interesting thing about Stef Penney – who won the Costa Book of the Year in 2006 with this book – is that for 15 years she suffered from agoraphobia, which prevented her from travelling on trains or planes. She has never been to Canada, and it apparently took her two and a half years to conquer her fear of London buses sufficiently that she could take one from her home in Hackney to the British Library to do her research. But her depictions of the tiny 19^th-century settlement of Dove River, and of the surrounding snowy wilderness through which Penney’s protagonist, Mrs Ross, journeys, are nonetheless so spot-on that Canadian readers couldn’t believe she’d never visited their country.

The story at its most basic level is a murder mystery: a French trapper is found with his throat slit the same day that Mrs Ross’s son disappears. When suspicion inevitably falls on her boy, Mrs Ross sets out on a journey in his tracks, intent on finding the truth. And so the mystery turns to gripping, page-turning adventure. The characters are compelling, the fur-trade history of Canada intrigues, and the winter landscape is brutally romantic. This is a book that stays with you long after it’s finished.