Christmas 2013: the best travel books of the year We may have heard too much about Patrick Leigh Fermor and Robert Macfarlane over the past 18 months, but don't let that put you off their books The Broken Road (John Murray, RRP £25, Telegraph price £23) and Holloway (Faber, RRP £14.99, Telegraph price £12.99). Even if you consign them to the spare bedroom, for production values and the art of bookmaking alone they are glorious objects. And once you decide to engage with them, they prove themselves to be endearingly open-hearted team efforts. Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron created The Broken Road from a rejected essay on walking (15 times the size requested of Paddy), some failed drafts and a pair of flimsy travel journals. But the author is arguably more present in their loving editorial hands - complete with his black depressions, name-dropping snobbery, flirtatious sexuality, ridiculous anti-Turkish prejudices - than in any of his other books. There is also that infectious enthusiasm for the road and the lived experience, for spoken language, oral knowledge and for everything Byzantine and Greek. Macfarlane's Holloway, on closer inspection, also reveals itself as a team product, fused with the words of his travelling companion Dan Richards and the engravings of Stanley Donwood. It is in the nature of Macfarlane's essential purpose as a travel writer to evoke and enthuse us with the songline of British nature observation, awakening us to the writings of Roger Deakin, WH Hudson, Edward Thomas (and in this book Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male) in order to understand how to marvel at the particular, right there before our eyes. It has always seemed to me that readers of travel writing tend to fall into two rival camps. I am an East-West reader, fascinated by differences in human culture but bored rigid by what I think of as North-South subjects - the conquest of mountains and the exploration of polar wildernesses. So I am going to ignore all those dozens of beautifully illustrated books published to chime with the anniversary of Scott in the Antarctic or the conquest of Everest. I was, however, taken by the work of one North-South writer, Sara Wheeler. In O My America! (Jonathan Cape, RRP £18.99, Telegraph price £16.99), Wheeler explores the building of modern America, as seen through the eyes of six confident, clever middle-aged women, most of whom made it their home in the 19th century but ultimately returned back to Britain. Part travelogue, part biography, part literary detective story (we follow the mother of Anthony Trollope, as well as the niece of Jane Austen), it is funny, sharp and full of uplifting musings on life's "second act." It also proves that in the matter of books, if nothing else, we have always occupied the same bed as our American cousins; the Thames flows into the Mississippi. Oliver Bullough's The Last Man in Russia (Allen Lane, RRP £20, Telegraph price £18) is a gritty, deeply embedded travelogue that investigates the culture of drinking, the decline of the Russian family and the experience of trying to remain a man in the Soviet system through a sleuth-like hunt for the real story behind Father Dmitry Dudko. This theme is partnered by Red Love (Pushkin Press, RRP £16.99, Telegraph price £14.99) by Maxim Leo, which though arguably more of a memoir than a classic travel book, also gives us extraordinary, intimate access to East Germany when the state was not just in the family apartment but locked within the minds and aspirations of all its citizens. I should stop now, but I also want to recommend two books that examine the ominous great cracks appearing in the interconnected, free-market, urban identity we have built so assiduously. In Calcutta (Union Books, paperback, £8.99) Amit Chaudhuri explores how and why one of India's great historic cities could have fallen into decay during the latter years of the 20th century. And Mark Binelli looks at what can be learnt from the very different history and experience of another doomed metropolis in The Last Days of Detroit (Bodley Head, RRP £20, Telegraph price £18).