Fifty-year-old canoe racer-turned-explorer West Hansen is planning to kayak the Amazon River when he learns that everyone - cartographers, adventurers, even his own sponsor, National Geographic Society - has misplaced the source of the world's greatest river. One of exploration's great prizes is suddenly back up for grabs, and to claim it all, Hansen has to shepherd a team of irascible Texans and international whitewater stars some 4,200 miles, from the crest of the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic Ocean.

Unspeakable is John Bercow's characteristically forthright and incisive account of his unique vantagepoint into British politics. Containing verdicts on many of the leading figures of this era, from Tony Blair to David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson, Bercow explores and explains the ways in which he has sought to democratise the business of Parliament, using the Speakership to champion the rights of backbench MPs and hold the government to account.

At the age of 24, Alastair Humphreys set off to try to cycle round the world. By the time he arrived back home, four years later, he had ridden 46,000 miles across five continents on a budget of just £7,000. From frozen Siberia tundra to the jungles of central Africa, Alastair recounts his extraordinary his adventures in two parts - Moods of Future Joys and Thunder & Sunshine - brought together in audiobook for the first time. 

Michael Palin reads his own account of a journey into a new Europe. Michael Palin's New Europe starts with a simple idea: that only a couple of hours from home are a half of Europe that is for him as unknown and unexplored as the plateau of Tibet or the vastness of the Sahara. Cut off for most of his life by Cold Wars and Iron Curtains, Europe's eastern lands are now open for business - and Michael sets off to discover them.

In January 2008, Graham Naismith, 37-year-old IT consultant and former police detective and his wife Eirene, aged 38 and a former teacher, spontaneously, and with no prior experience whatsoever, decided to embark on a 30,000 mile drive to Australia with their three daughters aged one, four, and six. Having previously sold their house in anticipation of a drop in the housing market and with Graham's job at the infamous ID Cards Scheme looking precarious, the climate was right.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine’s bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary and then Poland, Germany and the UK.

The First World War followed a period of sustained peace in Europe during which people talked with confidence of prosperity, progress and hope. But in 1914, Europe walked into a catastrophic conflict which killed millions of its men, bled its economies dry, shook empires and societies to pieces, and fatally undermined Europe's dominance of the world. It was a war which could have been avoided up to the last moment - so why did it happen?

No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio, or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce. The Way Home is a modern-day Walden - an honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life lived in nature without modern technology. Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, explores the hard-won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the stream, foraging, and fishing.

In April 2018, seasoned adventurer Ben Fogle and Olympic cycling gold medallist Victoria Pendleton, along with mountaineer Kenton Cool, took on their most exhausting challenge yet - climbing Everest for the British Red Cross in an attempt to highlight the environmental challenges mountains face. The expedition was to become the adventure of a lifetime, the culmination of a journey that started with a moment of tragedy years before. For Ben was inspired to take on this challenge by the memory of his son, Willem, who was stillborn in 2014.

Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames for over 15 years, in pursuit of the objects that the river unearths: from Neolithic flints to Roman hair pins, medieval buckles to Tudor buttons, Georgian clay pipes to Victorian toys. These objects tell her about London and its lost ways of life. Moving from the river's tidal origins in the west of the city to the point where it meets the sea in the east, Mudlarking is a search for urban solitude and history on the River Thames, what Lara calls 'the longest archaeological site in the world'.

In To the Island of Tides, Alistair Moffat travels to - and through the history of - the fated island of Lindisfarne. Walking from his home in the Borders, through the historical landscape of Scotland and northern England, he takes us on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of saints and scholars, before arriving for a secular retreat on the Holy Isle. To the Island of Tides is a meditation on the power of place, but also a more personal journey - a chance for a personal stocktaking and a reflection on where life leads us.

In 1935 a young Englishman named Laurie Lee arrived in Spain. He had never been overseas. His idea was to walk through the country, earning money for food by playing his violin in bars and plazas. Nearly a century later, the book Laurie Lee wrote - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - inspired Alastair Humphreys. It made him fall in love with Spain - the landscapes and the spirit - and with Laurie's style of travel. Alastair dreamed of retracing Laurie Lee’s footsteps but could never get past the hurdle of being distinctly unmusical. This year, he decided to go anyway.

For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.  

In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256 mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born.

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager - obsessed with music, food, and girls - but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents force him to enlist as a German soldier - a move they think will keep him out of combat.