VERY now and then I come across a book that makes me wonder why people bother writing fiction, the real world being so utterly strange and fascinating. Jenny Diski's latest book falls into just that category. It comes in three-and-a-bit parts: the first describing a trip around New Zealand, the second an account of a two-month long sojourn in the Quantock Hills in Somerset, and the third a travel-writing mission into that part of northern Sweden we call Lapland. Tagged onto the end is a short story written for the BBC about a writer who files pieces about foreign parts without ever venturing beyond her local library; travel writing for the home-loving woman.

Which, when I come to think about it, is not a bad description of the whole book. Diski claims that she'd much rather be at home with her partner, her books and her thoughts than wandering across the planet being miserable and getting in other people's hair. "Inertia is my thing, " she writes at one point. "The status quo, the still point of the present moment are what I aspire to. I am obdurate in this, not merely passive."

But I'm glad she managed to overcome her instincts long enough to write On Trying To Keep Still. I found it a real delight. Diski is a sharpeyed, sharp-witted woman and her writing has energy and clarity. She writes with a candour that seems to elude many, perhaps even most, male writers. Into her travel narratives she weaves episodes from her life.

Many of them are painful in the extreme: a fugitive father, a dangerously disturbed mother, a dismal childhood, being raped at the age of 14, a spell in a London psychiatric hospital in her early twenties. They are dark threads in an otherwise vivid tapestry.

As for the travel stuff, Diski is at her best when describing her jaunt to New Zealand at the invitation of the Wellington Readers and Writers festival. After a week swapping writerly tales with fellow-authors from various corners of the Anglosphere (which she didn't seem to enjoy much) she took herself off to Auckland where she found a young woman whose job it is to leap 600 feet down from the city's Skytower on the end of a wire. She was sitting in the cafe at the top of the tower when, to her horror, a human figure plummeted past the window. It was not a suicide;

it was the jumping girl.

"About 15 minutes later she jumped again, " Diski writes "but this time she stopped and hovered in mid-air outside the cafe window, waving at us, swaying from side to side in the wind, with a broad, open-mouthed smile, miming the cavernous, toothy scream of happiness that is now an essential part of the public expression of pleasure."

A few pages later Diski is reflecting on the seemingly perverse enthusiasm of New Zealanders for going down instead of up. "Only the desperate jumped from great heights, and they expected to do it just once."

More low-key was her two-month stay at a converted granary in the Quantock Hills in Somerset. She ruminates on the state of her health, the condition of her feet, her terror of spiders, and admits to having been infested by threadworms. She goes on to list the joys of a solitary life and the eating habits she falls into when her partner (always referred to as "the Poet") is absent. "Whenever I was hungry I made toast, and ate it with salami, cheese, peanut butter, or marmaladef Made four or five or six cups of tea (Assam, Harmutty Gold) each day."

Not that she was entirely housebound. She charged over the countryside on the back of a quad bike driven by the farmer from whom she rented the granary, wandered the Somerset shoreline, discovered a tiny, once-derelict church that had been restored by a retired vicar, and encountered an old Scotsman and his son who once ran Somerset's only camel-trekking business. One of their camels was named Tazruk, and Diski laments that "I was too late to sit between the humps of Tazruk and trek grandly up and down, over, around and across the Quantock hills."

Her foray among the people we call the Lapps and who know themselves as the Sami was a much livelier affair. Although the piece was commissioned by the Observer with expenses paid for by the Swedish tourist trade, Diski is scathing about travel journalism. "Advertising for the tourist industry, " is how she describes it, "and travel journalists are the means by which tour companies get to their public." The result, she says, is "a curious moral noman's-land".

Maybe, but she certainly makes the most of that landscape. Her descriptions of her Sami hosts and their struggle to make a living from tourism in the face of climate, geography and the condescension of their fellow Swedes are terrific. And her accounts of reindeer-powered sleigh rides across a landscape of snow and ice are vivid and quite beautiful.

Diski spent most of her time among the Sami wrapped in layer after layer of clothes in an attempt to keep out the Arctic cold. There's a seriously funny passage in which she describes wrestling with her clothes in the dark in order to do a pee. She writes: "Peeing on the ground in the middle of the night in the midst of a herd of reindeer inside the Arctic Circle. Who would have thought it?"

Who indeed? This is travel writing with a difference. It adds up to an acute, engaging, funny and sometimes memorable piece of work. One that's peppered with wry observations. A book for Diski's many fans.

I'm now one of them.