Walking in Britain (Lonely Planet Publications, August 25, £13.99)

A truly comprehensive book about walking in Britain would be about a yard wide, so Lonely Planet has come up with the next best thing - a single volume that gives a 550-page overview of most of the walking opportunities in England, Wales and Scotland.

It takes 23 good walking areas and describes in each of them one or two long-distance walks - often including a national trail - followed by a couple of high-class shorter routes and a section summarising other walks and how to get information about them.

A good example is the section on the Yorkshire Dales, which gives the six-day Dales Way from Ilkey to Bowness-on-Windermere, the strenu ous all-day Three Peaks walk, a six-hour circuit in Wharfedale and Littondale, and brief references to places such as Malham and the Howgill Fells. There are also boxes on route highlights, local buildings and episodes from history.

There's usually enough detail on the routes it describes for you to get by with this book alone - 18 pages on the Pennine Way - but most people are likely to want an Ordnance Survey or Harvey's map to give more detail, and probably a longer, dedicated guide like the Aurum Press series on the national trails.

This book is written with foreign visitors in mind and so has sections on tipping and the British class system. But it's also ideal for Brits interested in widening their walking experience, and it's stuffed with addresses, websites and sections on flora and fauna, health and safety, which make it a good reference source for even the oldest hand.

It's written in a cheery, familiar style which often amuses and sometimes grates. So it refers to the traditional English breakfast as "eating half a farmyard", but tops a very sensible section on hygiene with the heading "Do walkers shit in the woods?". There's always something that gives away Lonely Planet's plain-speaking Aussie origins.