It's 1902, you're stuck for somewhere to spend your leave from the Foreign Office, and then you get a telegram inviting you to go duck-shooting on a yacht in the Baltic. But, when you get there, there are no ducks, and the yacht only has room for two, and your friend wants you to help him untangle an international spying game of treason and riddling identity changes. You also have to learn to sail, fast, in the first gales of autumn. The German navy are interested in your activities, and someone is trying to prove that you're a spy. Which you are, inadvertently. It's all rather awkward, but it's becoming a mission of national importance. For readers who don't mind oil stains on board as long as there is fresh bread once a week.

Africa in the 1960s was dangerous and full of life. Van der Post's great adventure novel A Story Like The Wind (its must-read sequel is A Far-Off Place) is an African idyll destroyed by mercenaries heading for the Angolan war of independance. It's a mix of wildlife conservation and John Buchan. If you like your wildlife narratives given a desperate urgency, or you like your thrillers to ride on the back of the impala, this is the fireside read for you this winter.

Waves, wind, puffins, sheep, tumbled stones, wet grass and rats underfoot in the house when they think they can get away with it. Welcome to the Shiant Isles, which have been sitting between Lewis and mainland Scotland for millennia. The history of these lumps of rock has been put together by Adam Nicolson in Sea-Room, in a tumble of personal story and archaeological finds. Thousands of sea-birds live on the rocks in the summer, no-one lives on the islands in winter except sheep. Fishermen come and go, and the rats keep coming back. The islands mean a great many things to the people who go there, and even more to those who died there. For those who like to read about wild weather and the remoter parts of Britain with their feet dry and the door shut.

Cod-fishing, and a summer learning to sail off the Grand Banks, redeems a spoiled brat who fell into the Atlantic off an ocean-going liner at the end of the 19th century. Kipling's story of hard work and the democracy of the sea is a great read about sailing and fishing in the old-fashioned way. It's a record of a lost way of American life, and has a lot to say to modern readers about honesty and the virtues of earning what you receive. Be careful of what's at the end of that fishing line. For those who like fish guts in their tall stories.

This podcast talks about two novels by Scottish novelist John Buchan, once terrifically famous for The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), then moribund for decades, and now an up-and-coming out-of-copyright favourite for a new generation of readers. John Macnab (1925) is a Highland romp, where three bored men of high position cure their ennui by poaching two stags and a salmon. The Gap in the Curtain (1932) is science fiction, combining five linked short stories to show what happens when you can see into the future, and it's impossible, or not what you want to see at all. For readers who like their outdoor chases rugged.