Shand's touching, eloquent and entertaining chronicle of a journey from Tibet across Arunachal Pradesh to the Bay of Bengal on the mighty Brahmaputra -- in the company of his Indian hunting dog Bhaiti. Don't be put off by the canine angle (though the relationship between man and dog is touching), Shand is a terrific writer, an adventurer of the highest sort -- and wonderfully funny in the most dire of circumstances. Shand won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for his earlier Travels on My Elephant.  (IDA256, $16.95)