His books include:
- Historical and Travel writing
- A far country : travels in Ethiopia, Century, 1990 ISBN 0712625666
- The crossing place : a journey among the Armenians, HarperCollins, 1993 ISBN 0002158787 [ Somerset Maugham Award in 1994]. This book is being currently translated into Spanish thanks to an Artist Residency granted by the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts.
- The Bronski house : a return to the Borderlands, HarperCollins, 1995 ISBN 0002556308 ["a story of multi-generational Polish exile involving Zofia Ilinska, friend, neighbour and poet" ]
- The spirit-wrestlers : a Russian journey, HarperCollins, 1998 [ Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 1999]
- The chains of heaven : An Ethiopian romance, HarperCollins, 2005 ISBN 0007173474
- The barefoot emperor : an Ethiopian tragedy, HarperPress, 2007 ISBN 0-00717345-8 [A life of Tewodros II of Ethiopia].
- Novels
- The Main Cages, Flamingo, 2002 ISBN 0007136390
The novel is set in the English county of Cornwall during the mid-1930s .
- Spectator anthologies
- Views from abroad : the Spectator book of travel writing, edited by Philip Marsden-Smedley and Jeffrey Klinke, London: Grafton, 1988 ISBN 0-58608896-2
- Articles of war : the Spectator book of World War II, edited by Fiona Glass and Philip Marsden-Smedley, London : Grafton, 1989 ISBN 0-24613394-5
- Britain in the eighties : the Spectator’s view of the Thatcher decade / edited by Philip Marsden-Smedley, Grafton, 1989 ISBN 0246133953