Travel Writing & Commentary

Brought to you by Penguin. Brimming with wry humour and fascinating insights, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country. With his eightieth birthday looming, it crossed Michael Palin’s mind that now might be the time to hang up his boots, to lounge about at home, to take things...

Brought to you by Penguin. AS SEEN ON TV Professor Alice Roberts travels 1,300 miles by train across Italy, France and Spain in search of a greater understanding of the Roman Empire for Channel 4's popular TV series Roman Empire by Train with Alice Roberts. Visiting sites often off the beaten...

In early 2022, Charlie Walker set out to hike 600 miles along the frozen rivers of Siberia. He hoped to cut through the myth of the gulag and the permafrost to understand who its people are and how they reckon with their haunted past, as well as what the future might hold for this remote corner of our world. But on 24 February, Russia invaded Ukraine, with devastating consequences. What had begun as an adventure swiftly descended into a paranoid nightmare, as Walker began to suspect he was being monitored by the Russian authorities. Shortly afterwards he was arrested and imprisoned.

Top of the Morgen! charts the adventures of Laurence Falconer, a craic-loving Dubliner, as he tries to get to grips with a new life in Germany. In his hilarious, heart-warming and self-deprecating style, Laurence explores and celebrates the similarities between the Irish and the Germans...

What happens when you take a battered Dacia Duster, one determined couple, and point them toward the edge of the world? A Dirty Duster to Iceland: Circumnavigating Fire and Ice is not your typical guidebook—and not quite a travel diary either. It sits somewhere in between. Part road trip, part reflection, and part survival-by-sandwiches, this is a fourteen-day, 2,300-kilometre journey around Iceland’s Ring Road—across volcanic plains, glacial lagoons, windswept fjords, and vast stretches of beautiful, bewildering nothingness.

A new apartment. A new city. The boxes remain in the corner, unopened. This formal, unhurried memoir documents an arrival. It is a record of an individual mind attempting to find a rhythm in an unfamiliar place, a place defined by its constant, wet spring and its sensory intrusions.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the anxious traveller, where panic strikes in the most serene situations, where each time you're convinced that the symptoms are in fact physical and your lungs or heart will stop working, and the only relief is a paramedic telling you that you won't die...

The clichés about Mozambique spill out easily. This African country has been synonymous with war and poverty since independence from Portugal half a century ago. But is that all there is? Stephen Powell travelled the length of the country, to appreciate its beauty and find stories which dig deeper into Mozambique’s human reality. He visited the inspiring Gorongosa national park, where an international team has restored biodiversity, created jobs and provided education in a region once riven by conflict.

A heartrending, transformative true story following Brad Ryan and his grandmother Joy Ryan as they embark on a seven-year journey to visit every US National Park. Raised in Appalachia, Grandma Joy lived a life shaped by constraints and hardships, while Brad grappled with the weight of family...

In 2011, Alexa West sat on her bedroom floor, packed her life into a backpack, and got on a one-way flight with just $200 in her pocket. She turned that $200 into over ten years of full-time travel. She went from budget backpacker to solo female travel expert—and now teaches thousands of women how to travel alone and make money from anywhere. The One-Way Ticket Plan reveals her decade's worth of lessons, regrets, embarrassments, love stories, shortcuts, and problem-solving strategies—all packed into a hilarious pause-resister and actionable plan for a total life makeover.