This is wonderful! Interesting, informative and with lovely photography that brings everything to life, it's the perfect gift for the armchair traveller. it's also something worth having if you are a day-dreamer like I am, you can pick it up and get lost in among the wonderful places on our planet.

I love landscape photography and, as someone who’s never travelled outside of my country, I enjoy imagining all of the places I’ll travel when I stumble across the millions of dollars that have been hiding from me.

This book takes you around the world in 180 photos, highlighting some lesser known places. My travel bucket list has grown extensively as a result.

There’s the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, Canada, with over 15 million items!

As someone who collects sea glass, I need to see Glass Beach in California. There are colours there I don’t have in my collection.

I definitely need to learn how to abseil so I can see the ‘heavenly light’ above the sinkhole in Jomblang Cave in Indonesia.

I want to wander around the Maol-bhuidhe bothy in Scotland and see Cueva de los Verdes, a network of lava tubes,
in Lanzarote, Spain. I need to explore the island of Porto Santo in Madeira, Portugal.

Teufelsbrücke (‘Devil’s Bridge) in Rakotzbrücke, Germany fascinates me and I’ve wanted to see the Crooked Forest in Gryfino, Poland for years.

My favourite photo was of Thor’s Well in Oregon, USA.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Amber Books for the opportunity to read this book.

I was ready to be delighted by this book. I love photograph books, and I was intrigued by the idea of using stock photography to fit a writer's structure rather than centering on a single photographer or more tightly focused theme. The photographs themselves are a testament to how good "stock" photography can be. I'm sure there were some limitations caused by the available photographs, which might explain the absence or over-representation of some places. However, the book fell entirely down in the Africa and Middle East section, which was significantly shorter than the other sections and treated Africa largely as a place to see mega fauna. People and architecture were almost entirely absent in this section, while they featured heavily in Europe. This is a deeply problematic approach to the region. Asia and the Pacific was only marginally better. It was at least of similar length to the Europe and Americas sections, but architecture mostly appeared as ruins, and people were nearly absent. It felt very exoticizing, and the book has a distinctly white tourist gaze.

Fascinating! Well written with the key information of each site and stunning photography.

I have only visited a couple of the epic spots in this book and as a keen traveller, I am excited to have added many more “must-see” hidden gems to my list.

5 ⭐️ Thanks to Netgalley, Claudia Martin and Amber for an ARC in return for an honest review.

Amber Books book are perfect for armchair travel of if you are curious and want to see new places.
This was an informative and interesting book with great pictures.
Perfect in paper.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Hidden Places by Claudia Martin is currently scheduled for release on April 14 2024. From the psychedelic salt mines of Yekaterinburg in Siberia to the rugged, green-tinted Copper Canyon in the Sierra Madre in Mexico, Hidden Places roams across the globe in search of hidden treasures and secret places off the beaten track. Explore the Silfra Deep Trench in Iceland, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet to create a remarkable rift and freshwater dive site; experience the weirdest of woodland walks through the Crooked Forest in Pomerania, Poland, where a grove of 400 pines are uniformly curved; marvel at the colourful, gold-plated temple of Doi Suthep in northern Thailand; or visit the world’s highest sand dune, Grande Dune du Pilat, on the Bordeaux coast. Each location is accompanied by a caption explaining the geography and history of the place. Illustrated with 180 colour photographs, Hidden Places ranges from the sparse landscape of the Arctic Circle to the rich rainforests of the Amazon basin. Read this book and discover the special, hidden places that will come to define your bucket list – many of which are much closer to home than you think.

Hidden Places is a lovely collection of images with a brief disruption about each photograph and what really makes the location special and relatively unknown by travelers. I thought the chosen photographs were stunning, and they focused on the wonders of the landscape for the most part but with select human structures where appropriate. I am not much of a traveler, but I found that this book gave me a bit of wonderlust. However, I am going to channel that into finding some quiet and beautiful locations a little closer to home than those in this book.

Another beautiful book to drool over from Amber Books! This was such a treat to discover so many stunning places all over the world that are slightly off the beaten track, or little heard of! My jaw dropped many a time as I turned each page to see what was next!

There are hidden places up high, and under the sea, and this book features them in stunning detail via photographs and text that shares more information about them - there are villages, temples, beaches and mountains and many of which I'd never even heard of!

The quality of photography is exceptional and just shows how wonderful nature is when you see these sights that the globe has to offer!

Thank you NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this book ahead of time in exchange for a review. You should read it!

I love this so much. I have so many new places to add to my bucket list!! The pictures were absolutely gorgeous and I really enjoyed how it was broken down to continents.

My feedback won't have changed much since seeing the earlier, 2022 edition:-

From the very outback of nowhere, to Colmar's gorgeous Germanic but still French buildings, and, er, Lanzarote – this book successfully serves the armchair traveller wanting the esoteric. And by my unique juxtaposition of Lanzarote and esoteric you know either more about the world than I did, and/or that this is a sterling success. Perfect photographic selection, and snappy little captions heavy on the geology to explain why these places are so admirable and unique, make this a wonderful coffee-table type affair. You practically cheer when a place you've been crops up – it happened about six or eight times for me (and took me to one of my second homes in my fantasy existence) but you've got to have put in some serious air miles for this to feel old hat. The fact this never once bodges the road to its remit makes this a five star book for me – hidden rarity indeed.

An Absolutely stunning book! There are so many incredible places on this planet and I would love to see them all. I enjoyed how this book focuses on places not often featured on travel sites, from jungles to tundra, ancient sites, and serene beaches. If you enjoy travel or nature, then you'll enjoy this book also.
Thank you to the author and publisher for an arc.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for giving me this eArc to review.

This is a beautiful book of places in the world and would be a beautiful coffee table book. There wasn't a lot of detail on the places shown but it tells the reader where they are and has a tiny amount of information with the photograph.

Hidden Places: Exploring Beyond the Familiar by Claudia Martin takes us to remarkable natural or man-made places off the beaten track in the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia and the Pacific. This is in fact a new edition of Hidden Places: From Secret Shores to Sacred Shrines, which was published in 2022. I wasn’t aware of that when I requested it, I’d hoped for a whole new book of hidden places, which, unfortunately, wasn’t the case and I did recognise quite a few photos. (I’m not sure if the ones that didn’t ring a bell are new ones, or ones I forgot about, my memory is what it is 😬).
In any case, I loved revisiting Hidden Places and I think that’s the highest praise you can give any book. Here is my original review I still stand by:
As a fan of Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series, I loved seeing photos of Yukon, Canada and its second largest town Dawson City. I had no idea that there is a US national park protecting sand dunes up to 230m high in Colorado, nor that a few of the islands off Wisconsin get so cold in winter, their waves and waterfalls freeze, truly spectacular photos. I learnt a whole lot about Europe as well (did you know there’s a village in Italy you can only reach by means of a footbridge from the neighbouring town or that there’s a forest of crooked trees in Poland?) and Hidden Places made me put two countries I’d never even considered visiting on my travel bucket list: Slovenia and Romania. I also bumped Ireland up the list, I’ve always wanted to visit but now I’ve added Killarney National Park and its Torc Waterfall to my to-visit list, it’s one of my favourite photos in this book and I love the legend behind the name. Hidden Places is filled to the brim with stunning photos but two other favourites of mine are the Hitachi Seaside park in Japan, with its fields of baby blue-eyes flowers as far as the eye can reach, and the Rakotzbrücke in Germany, which is the only place I’d heard of before picking up this book.
Hidden Places is guaranteed to fuel your wanderlust and is a perfect book for any (armchair) traveller.

Hidden Places roams across the globe in search of hidden treasures and secret places off the beaten track. Full of beautiful pictures, many jaw-dropping, of places that are remote, interesting, and generally out of the way and hard to get to. There are a few of exotic places most of us will never have the chance to travel to that are easier to get to, gems hidden in plain sight. Wonderful little captions and info bits about these fascinating places. I'd love to have this on my coffee table and browse through it when I get itchy feet. 🙂

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced digital reader's copy (ARC) in exchange for an honest review!

Beautiful images of course, made me travel-sick and reminded how truly mesmerizing the world is. So many versions of what ‘the wild’ means — fascinating. I however gave this book 3 stars for one specific reason: the usual places, regions really, are highlighted and lingered on. Africa and the Middle East chapter was the shortest and least interesting… which is not reflective of reality. I have lived on three continents including Africa and I can tell you that it has some incredible wonders. That was certainly disappointing.

Hidden Places by Claudia Martin is a varied collection of fantastic destinations to visit. Some are well known, many are uncommon. Chapters are broken down into The Americas, Europe, Africa and Middle East, Asia and Pacific and the options are inexhaustible. Just imagine how many thousands upon thousands of hidden places there are! Glorious photographs are accompanied by brief text descriptions. Most places are natural wonders, though some are constructed by humans.

Beautiful in its own way, Glass Beach in California is a blend of nature and environmental harm. Gape at the frozen waterfalls in Wisconsin and stepped limestone pools in Guatemala. Explore ancient civilization ruins in Peru, lovely Estonian windmills, medieval clifftop fishing villages in France, lava tubes in Spain, Park of Monsters in Italy, Postojna Cave in Slovenia and lovely Cochem in Germany. Leptis Magna in Libya has always beguiled me. The protected islands in Mozambique, mausoleum in Uzbekistan, Secret Falls in Australia and the most secluded of all, the country island of Tuvalu, beckon invitingly.

I'm grateful to have been to countless hidden places all over, including ten of those described here. Though not all are off the beaten path, they are life enriching to explore. Who doesn't love the challenge and mystery of searching for treasures and satisfaction of discovery?

Whether you enjoy armchair travel or becoming immersed in a destination (not to mention the journey), you will adore this book. Even the most experienced traveler will find inspiration here.

My sincere thank you to Amber and Ltd. and NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this phenomenal book which I eagerly and thoroughly absorbed like a sponge.

A pictorial book that's perfect for coffee tables and travel enthusiasts. The book compiles a list of less popular places across the globe. You will find the book distributing its itineraries continent and country-wise, sharing glimpses of specific places that can touch your soul. From beaches to mountains, architecture to natural beauty, it has most of them covered.

I love travelling and reading so this book felt like it was a great pick for me and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw a place I visited (Doi Suthep) mentioned in the blurb of this book. Upon reading further, I came across at least 4 places that I can verify are beautiful places. This gave me the confirmation I needed to give this book a green tick for people who love travelling to unusual places that steal your heart.

Thank you @netgalley and @amberbooksltd for the e-ARC. I am sure the physical book will be much more beautiful

Genre: #travel #nonfiction
Rating: 4/5 star

You can watch the full book review on my YT channel:
https://youtu.be/RMeHEn7zGTI?si=sooEgYQSNciSCAjj

Holy moly!! I love traveling but I think I've been doing it wrong. I need to figure out how to add some of these places to a travel agenda. They're so gorgeous and awe-inspiring that they barely seem real. I highly recommend this as a gift, as a coffee table book, for all libraries, and for people who love to dream. Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

Most of the photos in this book will take you to places on this Earth that are just unbelievable. Places that most of us will never see. Places that some of us will never know are there. They make you wonder if you are really on the same planet. Although I would have liked more information about each place, it is a peek at the world that I definitely appreciate. I thank NetGalley and Amber Books Ltd. for the tour!

This is a new edition of a book originally published in 2022. In this gorgeous 224-page photography book, travel writer Claudia Martin shares “strange and wonderful places that are little visited and little known.” Each location typically gets a photograph or two with an informative caption, and locations are featured from each continent except Antarctica.

The content feels a bit random, so I would have liked to read more about how these particular locations were chosen. Maps showing where the sites are located would also have been a welcome addition. You could use this book to inspire future travel plans, but not much information is included about each site, just a brief paragraph. If a photograph catches your interest, you can always research that site more yourself. Some of these photographs certainly piqued my curiosity.

At 12 by 9 inches, this attractive hardcover book would make a wonderful gift or be an interesting addition to your coffee table.

Thanks to Amber Books for providing me with an ARC through NetGalley. I volunteered to provide an honest review.