In The Land of Maybe (Short Books, £14.99; Tablet price £13.49), Tim Ecott writes about a year spent in the Faroes, 18 remote islands off the top of Scotland. He writes with a passion for nature, which is pretty much all there is in a place that can be summed up in three words – sheep, seabirds and storms – weaving his own Irish background into his travels around a sparsely inhabited archipelago that clings to a traditional way of life in the modern world.