Step By Step
By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
LIMITED TIME OFFER
Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
Step By Step
Narrated by:
Simon Reeve
Buy Now for £12.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Simon Reeve
-
By:
-
Simon Reeve
About this listen
TV documentary maker Simon Reeve has dodged bullets on frontlines, hunted with the Bushmen of the Kalahari, dived with manta rays, seals and sharks, survived malaria, walked through minefields, tracked lions on foot, been taught to fish by the President of Moldova, and detained for spying by the KGB. After a decade spent making more than 80 programmes he has become a familiar face on British TV, well known for his extraordinary journeys across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world. But what most people don't know is that Simon's own journey started in a rough area of Acton, West London where he was brought up and left school with no qualifications. For the first time he will tell his life story with a book rich in anecdotes to entertain and inform readers about some of the most fascinating (and often dangerous) places in the world and what it took to reach them.
(P)2018 Hodder & Stoughton Limited©2018 Simon Reeve
Listeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
Reeve is a most likeable travelling companion, and the joy of the open road radiates from these pages
Genuinely interesting stories... remarkable
This vivid account of his fascinating, often hair-raising crusades feels more like an enthralling exchange over coffee with a friend than a formal autobiography.
Fascinating... a very honest account of the world as he has seen it, from Acton to the ends of the Earth
Cracking stories from his travels
Simon Reeve, a man whose very name is a guarantee of interesting television. Outstanding.
TV's most interesting globetrotter
The craziest (or bravest) man on TV
In the last decade, he's made a name for himself as British TV's most adventurous presenter. He's hunted with the Bushmen of Kalahari, hung out with biker outlaws in Australia and been taught to fish by the president of Moldova.
You can be sure to trust Simon to find a fun story. Simon might just be the best tour guide in the world.
Reeve is in a class of his own
It is an account of his mind's journey to inner peace - and it is wonderfully life-affirming (Max Pemberton)
Audible Sessions with Simon Reeve
Meet the author and narrator of Step by Step
0:00
A “ must read”
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A memoir as well as a travelogue, Step by Step presents his childhood in Acton which was not one you’d expect a courageous traveller to emerge from. School was nothing much and he left without qualifications; his adolescence was deeply troubled and some of his acts of vandalism and out of control behaviour are truly shocking; dogged by depression he came within moments of suicide. I feel for both adolescent Simon but also for his parents who must have suffered years of worry. It was the therapist who told him to take his life ‘step by step’, advice he took to heart.
It was a chain of luck and pluck that got him onto the Sunday Times as a post boy and from there he started writing travel articles. At last absorbed by a passionate interest, he researched the bombs used in the attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993 and wrote the prophetic The New Jackals. After 9/11 and he was feted as the world specialist on Islamic terrorism and The New Jackals which had all but disappeared became New York best seller. Never in his wildest dreams as he drove round Acton in his granny’s adapted car (apart from his BMX bike his only childhood adventures) could Simon have imagined such a life path!
His brilliant travel adventures – ‘adventures with purpose’ he calls them – followed. His engaging amazement and wonderment never leaves him as he travels world wide – not merely observing but getting right in with the people (often requiring sharing prodigious amounts of local alcohol and food. Fancy barbecued rat?) to learn what life is really like. Abject poverty (Somalia, the ‘Stans’) and ruination of the environment (the draining of the Aral Sea) can leave him in tears of despair and sorrow as he draws the listener into places where most people will probably never go. He’s faced terrifying dangers (a stand-off in Mogadishu between his minders and a local gang, both groups armed with anti-aircraft guns).
Above all Simon is totally unpretentious and hugely generous in his investigations, his empathy and zeal, his determination to learn and experience more and more bursting from him and never failing to bind the listener. Even his camera crew are repeatedly appreciated for their work lugging camera equipment as heavy as a fat Labrador through rough terrain, sweltering heat or bitter cold.
Just great!
Adventure with purpose
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An inspiring story
Thouroughly enjoyable
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
If you’ve watched any of his travel documentaries, you’ll remember his enthusiasm for meeting new people and travelling to dangerous countries around the world. He always comes across as excited and full of life with not a worry in the world. This book opens up his early life to reveal a completely different person who struggled with mental health issues and problems with his father’s authority as a teenager, something that you’d never imagine from his on screen personae.
He was so open about these issues that I wanted to give him a big hug and tell him everything would be okay. He talks about how desperately depressed he was, how disinterested he was with school and his future.
His account of how he got lucky with a job as The Times mail boy and how he progressed on the paper was fascinating. As was his research for his book “The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism” that sank without a trace in 1999.
The stories of his first travel documentaries were really interesting revealing how he wanted to be more Michael Palin than Alan Wicker on TV.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough, especially if you too have enjoyed Simon’s travel documentaries.
Wonderful Listen
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Simply Amazing!!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.