A photographic tour of Cambodia’s temples, including tips and advice for travellers, suggested itineraries and more, as well as links to maps and more than 850 photographs.

The information is up to date, up to and including apps to use to help navigate and the price of elephant travel, and would be extremely useful to anyone visiting. However, I can also see it dating quite quickly as it includes things like phone numbers for local cafes. For anyone travelling to Cambodia or interested in the history of the country, this book would be a gem – and extremely useful if you were looking for places to eat or stop along the way and entertainment that might be off the beaten track. The tips on history and things to look out for are extremely interesting.

He didn’t just tour temples: the section on the Killing Fields memorial is heartbreaking, particularly the stark signs that detail exactly what went on. “Killing tree against which executioners beat children” and the mass graves where clothing and occasionally bodies still emerge.It pulls no punches on the scale of the genocide, starkly stating in one location that up to 20,000 people were tortured at one location. When the soldiers liberated the city they found seven alive. The Killing Fields and Genocide Museum both carry warnings that these are not for children or the easily shocked.

There are a few typos and grammar errors, e.g. “pic-ups” not “pick-ups”, commas need to be culled, and some of the phrasing is a little awkward. I would have preferred perhaps slightly more text about each location – there are only a few lines – but this is a photo journal and the images are clear and distinct. Unfortunately several have no individual caption, or the captions appear on the following page above another picture, making it harder to tell what I was looking at.

As a travel guide to Cambodia, this would probably be extremely useful for visitors. For anyone interested in the history of the area and what has happened more recently, this could also be a valuable resource. Despite great photographs and useful content, it gets a three sadly – the formatting and occasional spelling errors drop it from a four.