I’ve been reading about the Sahara for nearly 50 years – just a bit longer than I’ve been travelling there. Here are my favourites and, as it’s Christmas, a few turkeys.

Libyan Sands ~ Ralph Bagnold
1935 and reprints
Ralph Bagnold

Ralph Bagnold really was quite an exceptional guy and Libyan Sands must be the best Saharan yarn written by a Brit. It describes his motor-car adventures and explorations in the Libyan Desert while stationed in Egypt in the 1920s and early 30s. Using Model T Fords loaded down at times with 150 gallons of fuel, Ralph and his chums spent every spare moment of leave exploring the Libyan Desert of Egypt and northern Sudan. His enthusiasm for (often literally) pushing the spindly, steaming Fords across uncharted ergs helped develop today’s desert driving techniques such as sand ladders and low tyre pressures
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Sahara Tourist Guide, motor and aerial
1955
Shell

In the last decade of France’s colonial presence in North Africa, their part of Sahara was divided between three territories: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco: ‘AFN’, ‘AOF’ (and ‘AEF’. Just a couple of years before these colonies were dissolved and became the independent countries we know today, Shell released its fifth and final edition of the Guide du Tourisme Automobile au Sahara – the original Sahara Handbook or Sahara Overland, and a fascinating relic.
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Sahara Handbook
1980
Simon & Jan Glen

The first edition by Aussie authors, the Glens, was researched while teachers in Nigeria in an air-cooled VW Kombi, mostly in Niger and Algeria. Most other countries were not covered and at the time were barely visited. The book came out just as I was looking south beyond the waterlogged lanes of Surrey and was a treasure trove of know-how and inspiration. They posited a respectful attitude towards local cultures, rather than seeing the Sahara as a venue for stunts or bombing around in 4x4s. Besides biking, which was barely covered in two pages, I learned a whole lot from this book and the sources it recommended.

Skeletons on the Zahara
2005
Dean King

This astonishing yarn expands on the gruelling tale of the 1815 wreck and enslavement of the crew of an American brig off Cap Boujdour. The ordeal the crew suffered at the hands of the barbaric Western Saharan tribes (described collectively but not so accurately as ‘Saharawi’) is truly horrendous.
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A Season in Hell; my 130 Days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda
2011
Robert Fowler

Robert Fowler’s account of his four-month captivity in northern Mali with Louis Guay in 2009 doesn’t so much leap off the page as grab you by the ears and haul you in. I read it over a weekend because here at last is a lucid, thoughtful and detailed description of an experience about which many of us wonder: ‘how would I cope if I was kidnapped?’. And before the first page is turned Fowler answers that question: ‘better than you’d assume’.
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Sahara Unveiled
1997
William Langewiesche

Having got to know Algeria as a commercial pilot (or so one presumes, we learn nothing about the author apart from the existence of a wife and son), William Langewiesche travels from Algiers to Dakar around 1990, as Islamic revolution and Tuareg unrest spread paranoia along the trans-Saharan Highway.
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Sheltering Sky
1949 and reprints
Paul Bowles

A cult novel by the Tangiers literary guru based on the author’s own experiences in North Africa. Not a thoughtful gift for a nervy visitor to Morocco, but a thrilling read if you like your desert with a bit of sex, madness, infidelity and death. The track from the Police’s Synchronicity album, Tea in the Sahara, relates a morbid legend described in this book.
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Wind, Sand and Stars
1939 and reprints
Antoine de Saint Exupery

An existential adventure classic based on the author’s semi-autobiographical escapades in the early days of commercial aviation. This included flying mail across the dreaded Terres des Hommes (the Western Sahara) where you saved the last bullet for yourself. It features the almost obligatory near-death experience after crashing in the Libyan Desert. 
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The Most Beautiful Desert of All
1958
Philippe Diole

Philippe Diolé, a close friend of jaques Cousteau, made a solo camel and lorry journey to the Tassili N’Ajjer and the Fezzan in the early fifties. The book conveys this beautifully, recalling the impressions, exciting moments and deep moving personal thoughts encountered during the month-long camel trek through the Tassili (including Wadi Djerat), accompanied by a single Tuareg guide. 
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Flyaway
1978
Desmond Bagley

Geographically authentic, fast-paced thriller set in the Hoggar, Tenere and Tassili of the central Sahara. This is Tintin for grown-ups, where laconic heroes say “what the hell…” a lot and casually swap diffs’ during sandstorms while chased by mysterious assassins.
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Trek
1991
Paul Stewart

I was working at the Travellers’ Bookshop when Trek came out in 1991 and of course, I gobbled up the desert drama, painstakingly researched by Paul Stewart. It came about after Stewart had the story recounted by one of the expedition’s survivor’s at her Kenyan guesthouse in the 1980s. He soon realised it was a headline on a June 1955 ‘day of your birth’ newspaper reprint he’d been gifted decades later.
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Mysterious Sahara
1935
Byron Khun de Prorok

Byron Khun the What? I’d never heard of this guy in the annals of Saharan exploration. Turns out he was an American with a Polish title who dedicated his early life to the exploration of ‘mysteries of the ancient world’, following a life-changing encounter with Shackleton as a youth. Prorok’s African expeditions in the 1920s and early 30s (notably ancient Carthage) became the subject of several books, as well as a series of popular lecture tours, films and articles back home.
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Egypt; Civilisation in the Sands
2000
Pauline and Phillipe de Flers

Thankfully not another ‘pharaohs and fellucas’ job. The first half covers the Western Oases (Siwa, Farafra, Dakhla, etc), the second the Sand Sea, Gilf and Uweinat: the history, rock art, inter-war explorers, geology, all with great photos and interesting boxed asides.
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The Forgotten Path
1966
David Newman

This book is a cracker. In 1959, with the French Sahara convulsed by wars of independence, Newman, an engineer who’d failed to launch “a product two years ahead of its time”  jacks it all in to visit a friend in Nigeria. But Newman decides to drive all the way across the desert – “the sort of adventure that had my nerve endings tingling”. And to make matters harder, he chooses to do it in his new Ford Zephyr.
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From Libyan Sands to Chad
1958
Nigel Heseltine

Of the same era but far less petulant than Newman, the author sets off on what turns out to be a vexatious journey across the Sahara through Libya to Lake Chad via the Tubu lands of the Tibesti and Ennedi. What makes this book so unusual in the era of unreviewably lame Travel Book Club adventures, is that the author is no fluffy travel writer, but a well-read if rather stroppy Theroux-esque character who doesn’t spare those who irritate him.
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The Unknown Sahara
1935
Laszlo Almasy

The eastern Sahara’s Libyan Desert (covering Egypt, Libya, Sudan), was one of the last corners of the desert to be explored and still remains wild and barely visited. In the late 1920 and early 30s – the Hungarian Almasy (a contemporary of Bagnold and Clayton and fictionalised as the ‘English Patient’) criss-crossed this region in then newfangled motorcars which enabled systematic exploration of this hyper-arid quarter.
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Quiet for a Tuesday
2008
Tom Sheppard

Tom Sheppard is much admired among a certain kind of Landrover enthusiast for his technical manuals on overlanding. This book is what his many fans have been waiting for, the background to acquiring that know-how over a series of desert trips spanning more than 40 years, mostly in Algeria, mostly in 4x4ss and almost all alone.
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Call of the Desert
2004
Philippe Bourseiller

Call of the Desert is a stonker. At around 4kg, it’s heavy enough to stun a full-grown horse and is packed with glossy, full-page portraits, close-ups and wide-angle vistas from the Atlantic to the Nile. All the mainstream Saharan shots all here in one book: the culture and landscapes of the Moors, some lovely Moroccan kasbahs, the Niger delta as well as Ounianga and the Ennedi and Meroe in Sudan – though not, noticeably the rich imagery of the Gilf and Uweinat – so falling just short of being the absolutely ultimate Saharan picture book.
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No one sets out to write a bad book, but some just can’t help themselves and want to be in print, some are out of their depth and some are plain disingenuous. Result: les dindes du desert.
Sahara Life of a Great Desert – Mark de Villiers & Sheila Hirtle
Turkey Supreme
Sahara – Clive Cussler
Turkey droppings
The Western Desert of Egypt ~ Cassandra Vivien
Turkey Twizzler
Sahara ~ Michael Palin
Turkey Lurky
Sandstorm ~ Henry Shukman
Turkey roadkill
Sahara, Souk & Atlas
Boxing Day leftovers