EXCITING LOW-CARB RECIPES by Carolyn Humphries (Foulsham, £5.99)

MELDING Dr Atkins's diet to the Mediterranean diet, Carolyn Humphries presents a range of tasty recipes that offer an exciting alternative to traditional Christmas cake. They allow you to remain healthy and well-fed without piling on the pounds - and they won't cost you a fortune either.

TIME OUT EATING AND DRINKING IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND (Time Out Guides, £12.99)

TIME Out city guides have established themselves as some of the clearest and most useful guidebooks to take abroad, and the same approach is carried through to this directory of some of the best places to eat and drink in Britain.

As well as the must-haves of opening times and prices, each venue has a concise but informative, and sometimes mouth-watering, summary. Thus we learn that at the Star in Harome, near Helmsley, it's almost obligatory to order the ginger parkin with rhubarb ice-cream for pudding, while the confit of lamb is a winner at the Rose and Crown in Romaldkirk, near Darlington.

Perhaps only to be expected in a Time Out guide, London is well represented. Although the authors could justifiably say the capital's restaurants are generally of a higher standard, it's still disappointing to see just a handful of entries for County Durham and none at all for Teesside, even if North Yorkshire does reasonably well. It's also really a restaurant and not a bar guide, for all that it claims to be for eating and drinking. These niggles aside, it's undoubtedly a useful tool to navigating your way around Britain's culinary scene.

COLLINS DISCOVERY WORLD ATLAS (HarperCollins, £17.99)

ANY map publisher has to confront the thorny problem of how to make their version different to all the others. After all, a map is a map is a map, isn't it? Not quite, as the Collins Discovery Atlas shows. Here, the problem has been solved by increasing the amount of detail in the maps themselves, and by providing additional information to run alongside.

In some respects, this is a definite advantage: physical maps of the continents, with particular features picked out, are both useful and not what you might find elsewhere, and the 40-odd pages of facts are both fascinating and easy to read.

In other ways, however, it is a demonstration of how you can have too much information. Marking major roads works well in countries where there are few of them, such as Australia and much of Africa, but makes the eastern United States resemble a particularly complicated home-made wiring system.

But on the whole, Collins should be commended for bringing out an atlas which tries to be informative as well as just a series of maps to pore over. A seven-page table of statistics is particularly valuable, providing at-a-glance comparisons of everything from literacy rates and Internet connections to carbon dioxide emissions and access to safe water, helping make this a welcome Christmas present for anyone with an interest in the world.

Published: 09/11/2004