On the Road with Kids

It's 1989, and Emma and her best friend, Dee, head to the USA to make their fortune. But completely inept and virtually unemployable, they discover that they can't even get a job in McDonald's. Forced to travel from California to New York with only pennies in their pockets, they bounce from scrape to scrape, surviving on their wits and the kindness of strangers. Bad luck and misfortune throw everything their way - snakes, earthquakes, black magic and incontinent dogs.

For the '70s child, summer holidays didn't mean the joy of CentreParcs or the sophistication of a Tuscan villa. They meant being crammed into a car with Grandma and heading to the coast. With just a tent for a home and a bucket for the necessities, we would set off on new adventures each year stoically resolving to enjoy ourselves. For Emma Kennedy, and her mum and dad, disaster always came along for the ride no matter where they went.

In April 2008, Jon Faine and his son Jack closed the door on their Melbourne home and, leaving jobs, studies, family and friends, took six months and went overland to London in their trusty 4-wheel-drive. This intelligent and funny recount of the countries they visited, people they met, and trouble they got into, is also the story of a tender father-son relationship.

One grey dismal day, Janine Marsh was on a trip to northern France to pick up some cheap wine. She returned to England a few hours later having put in an offer on a rundown old barn in the rural Seven Valleys area of Pas de Calais. This was not something she'd expected or planned for. Janine eventually gave up her job in London to move with her husband to live the good life in France. Or so she hoped. While getting to grips with the locals and la vie Française, and renovating her dilapidated new house, a building lacking the comforts of mains drainage, heating, or proper rooms.

If Joe and Vicky had known what relocating to a tiny mountain village in Andalucía would really be like, they might have hesitated. They can have no idea of the culture shock in store for them...no idea they'll become reluctant chicken farmers and own the most dangerous cockerel in Spain...no idea they'll help capture a vulture and be rescued by a mule. Will they stay, or will they return to the relative sanity of England?

This is the true story of a Londoner who gives up his job as an estate agent in the city, moves to the wilds of Exmoor, starts a smallholding and becomes self-sufficient, with a few bumps along the way. Simon's journey from urbanite to self-sufficient smallholder is brimming with incidents - some funny and some tragic - leading him to question Mother Nature, himself, the food he eats and his role in it all.

One day in late summer, Michael Wright gave up his comfortable South London existence and, with only his long-suffering cat for company, set out to begin a new life. His destination was "La Folie", a dilapidated 15th century farmhouse in need of love and renovation in the heart of rural France.

When Joe and his girlfriend Joy decide to trade in their life on a cold Lancashire fish market to run a bar in the Tenerife sunshine, they anticipate a paradise of sea, sand, and siestas. Little did they expect their foreign fantasy to turn out to be about as exotic as Bolton on a wet Monday morning.

The youngest of five siblings, Sara grew up on her father's cattle farm surrounded by dogs, cows, horses, fields and lots of 'cack'. The lanky kid sister - half girl, half forehead - a nuisance to the older kids, the farm was her very own dangerous adventure playground, 'a Bolton version of Narnia'. Her writing conjures up a time of wagon rides and haymaking and agricultural shows alongside chain-smoking pensioners, cabaret nights at the Conservative club and benign parenting.

In her debut memoir, A Van of One's Own, Biddy Wells tells the story of how, propelled by a thirst for peace and quiet, for a modest adventure and, perhaps, for freedom, she left for Portugal on her own, with only her old campervan, Myfanwy, and her GPS, Tanya, for company. Having left just about everything behind, her solo trip forces her to face her fears, her past and herself.

Following a drunken misunderstanding, Simon Dawson gave up his job in the city, moved to the wilds of Exmoor and became an accidental self-sufficient smallholder with an array of animals. But that was years ago now. Following up on his first book, Pigs in Clover, this is the story of what happens when he suddenly realises that his life is changing all over again. He's not quite the spring chicken that he used to be: he is, horror of horrors, getting older.

Danie Couchman grew up on the move, her family never staying still long enough for her to say where she's from. At 25, and living in her 17th home, she finds herself drowning in the rush of London life and makes an impulsive decision: to buy a narrowboat and make it her home. Surrounded by an eclectic and itinerant community in the uncharted territory of the capital's urban wilderness, Danie becomes fully immersed in this hidden world. Each day on board her boat, Genesis, is an adventure full of disaster and magic.

Ian Moore is a stand-up comedian in the UK and a husband, father of three boys, farmhand and chutney-maker in France. He is a mod in both walks of life and most of his time is spent travelling grumpily between the two. Comedian, mod and professional grump Ian Moore has had enough. Tired of being unable to park anywhere near his cramped house in a noisy town he doesn’t like, he hatches a plan to move his wife and young son to a remote corner of the Loire Valley in search of serenity and space.

From his childhood love of animals, through his training and first steps in the profession and the pressures and challenges faced by vets, dealing with unexpected exotic pets - and handling excitable humans too - Julian Norton has seen all sides of the veterinary world and writes about it all with humour and affection. Just as happy calving a cow, treating a dehydrated chameleon or tending to the overgrown teeth of a rabbit, his passion for his work shines through in every chapter.

In the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Sunday Times best seller Dummy comes Man vs. Toddler - the story of what happens when your little one is transformed from an innocent bundle of joy into a creature that walks, talks...and craps in a plastic bucket in the middle of your living room. Man vs Toddler exposes the lie that when it comes to parenting 'it gets easier'.