BEING FOOTLOOSE THIS summer is one thing – the mind could also do with a little loosening, a change of literary air and ideas. Start with Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths (Hamish Hamilton, £20/offer £18), which does just what it says in the title: takes off on an exhilarating, free-flowing, free-spirited exploration of the wild places of the earth and the wilderness of personal feelings not yet wholly lost to us but which most of us lack the courage to find.

Sometimes, of course, the real challenge is just to stay home and get wise to the blindingly obvious. Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind by Julian Baggini (Granta, £14.99/ £13.50) is a social survey of “safe” places, the suburbs of Rotherham, an archetypal English town, that confirms the English as communitarian, cautious, comfortable, complacent – and collusive about being nannied, an attitude scorned in Big Babies: Why Can’t We Just Grow Up? by Michael Bywater (Granta, £7.99/£7.19). In this stylish rant, tearing into the infantilisation of modern society, the big baby-boomer is ruthlessly thrown out of the pram. Bywater can’t then resist giving the monstrous infant a good kicking for its own good and his own polemical pleasure.

A bit of downtime soul-searching never goes amiss: Utopian Dreams: In Search of the Good Life by Tobias Jones (Faber, £12.99/£11.69) is one young man’s year-long quest, with wife and baby daughter in tow, for happier, communal alternatives to the depressing manners and morality of modern individualistic living.

Rejecting the certainties and cynicisms of the secular, Jones discovers the spirituality and simplicity of the sacred. He would recognise the truth in the idea that: “You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you”, a line from The Way of the World: Two Men in a Car from Geneva to the Khyber Pass by Nicolas Bouvier (Eland, £12.99/£11.69). This inspirational travel book, first published 40 ago, has fired the wanderlust of young European travellers ever since. In 1953, setting off in a Fiat Topolino, and taking it slow, Bouvier with his artist friend Thierry Vernet worked, played the accordion, slacked and sang their way into new lives and cult travel literature.

They would absolutely have understood Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta, £16.99/£15.29) which lifts the prudish skirts of Puritanism and sends it rollicking out into the streets to enjoy some collective fun. Religious repression and civil suppression lead to personal and collective depression is the message of this gleeful tribute to forgotten joy.

Good food is a reliable pleasure. The Big Oyster: A Molluscular History of New York by Mark Kurlansky (Vintage, £8.99/8.09) tells the story of Manhattan, bought by Peter Minuit for trade goods worth 60 guilders in 1626, together with the oyster beds of Oyster (later Ellis) Island, which were destroyed by pollution in the 1920s. Kurlansky is a quirky, quick-minded, gastronomic historian of commodities and culture.

Food can also be fatal. The Vitamin Murders: Who Killed Healthy Eating in Britain? by James Fergusson (Portobello, £12.99/£11.69) revives a constant cause célèbre in France, curiously long forgotten in Britain – the murder, while on holiday in France, of Churchill’s Chief Food Scientist, Sir Jack Drummond, his wife and young daughter.

Was Drummond killed because he was the man who knew too much about the dangers of commercial chemical contamination of postwar British food?

From industrial dirty deeds and espionage to political derring-do and spying: Agent Zigzag: Lover, Traitor, Hero, Spy by the Times writer Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury, £7.99/£7.19) opens the secret files of MI5 to reveal the two faces of Eddie Chapman, double-dealing double agent. With high humour, Macintyre spins a mile-long, yard-wide yarn of many colours, characters, coincidences, courage and cunning.

No summer is complete without romance. Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers by Antonia Quirke (HarperPerennial, £7.99/£7.19) serves it up as a chic, chick-lit memoir of a grand obsession (the girl can’t help it!) with a cast of leading men, movies and an infatuation with Gérard Depardieu that wrecks her own love life but – with the star performance of this book – makes her a dazzling leading lady, a popcorn princess, in her own right.

Now pour yourself a daiquiri and tune in to the beat of Anacaona: The Amazing Adventures of Cuba’s First All-Girl Dance Band by Alicia Castro (Atlantic, £19.99/ £17.99), a fast-stepping, hip-swaying, sax-swinging tale of high times, hot jazz and golden girls in old Havana – rum, Coca-Cola and cha-cha-cha.

Buy the books here

Celebrity Choice: Peter Snow, broadcaster

KHARTOUM by Michael Asher is the story of one of the most poignant military disasters, in which General Gordon lost his life, followed by the most spectacular rescue mission a decade later. It’s a breathtaking story anyway, but the racy narrative and detailed accuracy make this one of the most striking military history stories. Peter and Dan Snow’s The World’s Greatest Twentieth Century Battlefields (BBC Books, £18.99) is out now

Reader choice: THE BANDINI QUARTET by John Fante has wonderful semi-autobiographical stories, full of sumptuous prose. Fante’s Bandini is one of the finest creations of American literature, a fiery cocktail of bravado and insecurity. Spencer Grady, Croydon

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