Nine Lives by William Dalrymple

"Does travel writing have a future?" William Dalrymple asked in the autumn, with his tongue dancing against his cheek. The best travel books of 2009 – including his own Nine Lives – prove that the genre is alive and tripping, this year transporting readers between the planet's coldest and hottest destinations, as well as from its spiritual birth to nuclear death.

Nine Lives, Dalrymple's first travel book in a decade (Bloomsbury, £20), is a collection of short stories which explores how south Asia's religious traditions are being affected by modernity. He asks a temple dancer, "Is this a full-time job, becoming a god?" At a Bengali cremation ground – surrounded by naked sadhus playing cards - he enquires, "So how do you go about finding the right skull?" It's a wise and rewarding book fizzing with Dalrymple's signature erudition, solid opinion and lightness of touch.

Magnetic North by Sarah Wheeler

Sara Wheeler is a prolific raconteur of distant places and remote people. Her sixth book The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle (Jonathan Cape, £20) tells a sweeping, magnetic story – part-history lesson, part-portent, part-elegy – of her lifelong passion for the frozen top of the world. From Siberia to Nunavut she seeks out explorers, missionaries and death camp commissars. At the same time she traces the looming ecological disaster: global warming melting the ice caps, Norilsk Nickel spewing two million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere every year, Greenlanders' marine-borne toxin diet rendering some of them radioactive. "The survival of civilisation as we know it hangs on what happens in the Arctic," writes Wheeler. Her observations are occasionally poetic, often tragic and always wise and engaging.

Titian: The Last Days by Mark Hudson

These days many travel writers are keeping in step with our interactive times by collaborating with web gurus, photographers, game designers or – as in the case of Dalrymple – musicians, to create something new, and bring a more transformative experience to readers. In this vein author Mark Hudson's daughter was enlisted to record a plug for her dad's new book Titian: The Last Days (Bloomsbury, £20).

"I think it's boring but my Mum read it and she thought it was really interesting," nine-year-old Rachel declares on YouTube.

Hudson is on a mission to find the "real" Titian, reclaiming the celebrated 16th-century painter from the foxed pages of scholarly tomes. This is art history disguised as travel, a fascinating journey across northern Italy and into the Renaissance world with nothing boring about it.

With her eye on her father's move into multimedia, young Rachel Hudson adds, "It would be cool if it was made into a movie."

In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi is once again under house arrest. Earlier this year she was subjected to a sham trial, the purpose of which was to ensure that she'll remain locked up until after the May 2010 elections. So there's no better time to read Guy Delisle's heart-breaking comic masterpiece Burma Chronicles (Jonathan Cape, £14.99). This graphic travelogue, which traces the artist's time in Rangoon in whimsical, black-and-white drawings, is the most enlightening and insightful book on Burma in years. Buy it, and begin to understand the cruelty, injustice and absurdity of life in that beautiful, betrayed land.

Delhi: adventures in a megacity by Sam Miller

Books on India are ten-a-rupee. But in his wild, spiralling wonder of a book, Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity (Jonathan Cape, £14.99), Sam Miller has created the sharpest reflection of the capital since William Dalrymple's City of Djinns.

"Delhi, the city of Sultanates and Mughals, of Djinns and Sufis, of poets and courtesans, is now also a city of cybercafés and shopping malls, of Metros and multiplexes," enthuses Miller, a former BBC India correspondent. "It is the past and it is the future. It is also my home."

Across his pages gyrate the Gandhi family, V.S. Naipaul, Sting and Tintin. His vignettes of historical and contemporary figures are concise and impressionistic. Read this book and laugh, grow and gaze in gob-smacked wonder at India's whirling dreamtown – and its purgatory.

A Nuclear Family Vacation by Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger

In the 50s and 60s, paranoia about nuclear attack led to fallout shelters being built across the US, Russia and Europe. Thankfully nukes never rained from the skies and - ­ as the fear of all-out war has faded -­ nuclear tourism has mushroomed. Today bus loads of retirees drop by America's missile fields while the Bureau of Atomic Tourism guides travellers from the Manhattan Project to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

Step up to the launch pad husband-and-wife defence journalists Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger. Since 2005 their dispatches from battlezones and war rooms have been hugely popular on Slate. Now their articles have been collected together with new material in A Nuclear Family Vacation (Bloomsbury, £9.99), a guide to "the unique culture and history of the nuclear complex".

A Nuclear Family Vacation is not a book for the anxious traveller, not least because its authors found that nuclear labs and command posts are often surprisingly close to home. Worries about holiday tummy bugs will pale into insignificance on learning that your hotel is targeted by a bunkerbuster. But for the adventurous, ICBM-spotter, this is a readable and informative guide. It's also a wake-up call to an enduring, apocalyptic danger. Our fear of "Mutual Assured Destruction" may have faded but the US military still spends the same amount on nuclear weapons (in real terms) as it did at the height of the cold war.

• Rory MacLean's new book Missing Lives – with photographs by Nick Danziger – will be published by Dewi Lewis in the spring. His UK top tens Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon are available in Tauris Parke Paperbacks.