The Snakebite Survivors' Club by Jeremy Seal (Picador, £6.99 in UK)

As with all good travel writing, Seal's story is concerned less with its subject (deadly reptiles) and location (on four continents) and more with the people he encounters. In the southern Appalachians we meet the members of the Holiness sect, for whom Sunday worship includes handling rattlesnakes, and a preacher who hits on a novel way to dispose of his wife; in Queensland we go in search of the slippery Taipan, and the black mamba entices us to Kenya; in a small town in southern India we attend the annual cobra festival ("I confess I had not expected a how-high-can-your-cobra-go competition"). Stylish writing married to fine storytelling.