Showing titles in Travel Writing & Commentary

On a beautiful summer afternoon in 1998, Dan Stephens, a 22-year-old canoeist, was leading a trip deep into Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park. He stepped into a gap among cedar trees to look for the next portage - and did not return. More than four hours later, Dan awakened from a fall with a lump on his head and stumbled deeper into the woods, confused. Three years later, Jason Rasmussen, a third-year medical student who loved the forest's solitude, walked alone into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on a crisp fall day.

Brought to you by Penguin This celebration of the English countryside does not only focus on the rolling green landscapes and magnificent monuments that set England apart from the rest of the world. Many of the contributors bring their own special touch, presenting a refreshingly eclectic...

‘A truly powerful paean to the night sky’ CAROLINE EDEN, author of Black Sea ________________________________________________________________ At a time of personal crisis, travel writer and ‘dark sky’ advocate Megan Eaves-Egenes turned to the stars for solace. But those same stars, which...

This is the story of Shane and Timothy Spall and their Dutch barge, The Princess Matilda. After a summer on the Thames they head out to sea with only a road atlas and a vast amount of ignorance - and it is absolutely terrifying! A decade before, Tim had been diagnosed with acute leukaemia and was given only days to live. Shocked at how life can pass you by, they decided that if and when Tim got better, they would buy a boat. The Spalls' adventures have already been the subject of two BBC4 series.

Despite her success setting a self-supported Fastest Known Time record on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2013, Heather “Anish” Anderson still had such deep-seated insecurities that she became convinced her feat had been a fluke. So two years later she set out again, this time hiking through mud, rocks, and mountain blazes to crush her constant self-doubt and seek the true source of her strength and purpose. The 2,189 miles of the Appalachian Trail, from Maine to Georgia, did not make it easy.

A London cycle courier with a taste for adventure, Emily Chappell entered an extraordinary new race - The Transcontinental - in which riders must find their own way, entirely unassisted, across Europe in the shortest time possible. On her second attempt, she won the women's event, covering nearly 4,000 miles in 13 days and 10 hours, sleeping in short bursts wherever exhaustion took her.

'An epic quest - in which the journey is at least as entertaining as the end result' - Stephen Moss, author of Ten Birds That Changed the World 'Humorous, touching and refreshingly unsentimental' - Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road 'Highly entertaining and gloriously obsessional'...

Ghost Empire is a rare treasure - an utterly captivating blend of the historical and the contemporary, realised by a master storyteller. In 2014, Richard Fidler and his son Joe made a journey to Istanbul. Fired by Richard's passion for the rich history of the dazzling Byzantine Empire - centred around the legendary Constantinople - we are swept into some of the most extraordinary tales in history. The clash of civilisations, the fall of empires, the rise of Christianity, revenge, lust, murder.

The number one Sunday Times bestseller. Read by the author, Christian Lewis. 'Bursting with positivity and hope' – Ben Fogle Walking saved his life. Now it will help find him a family. In the follow-up to Finding Hildasay, with his dog by his side, former paratrooper Christian Lewis takes his...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius embarks on a rollicking intellectual journey, following in the footsteps of history’s greatest thinkers and showing us how each—from Epicurus to Gandhi, Thoreau to Beauvoir—offers practical and...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Kings of the Yukon by Andy Weymouth, read by Charlie Anson. The Yukon river is over 2,000 miles long, flowing northwest from Canada through the Yukon Territory and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of King salmon migrate the...

A "close-up look at the cloistered country" (USA Today), See You Again in Pyongyang is American writer Travis Jeppesen's "probing" and "artful" (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of his travels in North Korea--an eye-opening portrait that goes behind the headlines about Trump and Kim...

Disillusioned with corporate London life and with no previous experience as a long-distance cyclist, Anna decides to clamber atop a beautiful pink bicycle (named Boudica) and set out on an 11,000-mile journey on her own, through each and every state of the USA. Dodging floods, blizzards and electrical storms, she pedals side by side with mustangs of the Wild West, through towering redwood forests, past the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains and on to the volcanos of Hawaii.

Uncork a whole new take on the fascinating story of wine, captivatingly told by everyone’s favourite wine expert Oz Clarke. This fully updated edition takes us through the riveting twists and turns of the history of winemaking all the way to the very latest trials and innovations of the...

Joshua Slocum was believed to be the first man to sail single-handed around the world. After a distinguished career, where he worked his way up from cabin boy to captain, Joshua Slocum wrecked his ship off the coast of Brazil. Turning this catastrophe to his advantage, he built a sailing canoe from the wreckage and sailed back to New York. Moreover, he wrote Voyage of the Liberdad, a chronicle of his trip, and earned some literary success.

Preparing for the first winter in his new home, ready to embrace the slower pace of early retirement, he soon discovers that it’s not working. From floods to explosions, from protection rackets to hospitalisations, from coping with the death of his hero to trying to find solace in a confusing and abstract relationship, this is a frank, funny and always heartfelt story of how not working doesn’t always work out, and it might just be Graham’s wildest ride yet.

In January 2015 Dick and Angel Strawbridge embarked on the journey of a lifetime when they swapped their cosy two-bedroom flat in East London for a derelict château with 12 acres of land in the Loire valley. Where Sunday Times bestseller A Year At The Château told the entertaining and...

Carrying little more than a change of clothes and a pair of binoculars, two young Americans, Mark and Delia Owens, caught a plane to Africa, bought a thirdhand Land Rover, and drove deep into the Kalahari Desert. There they lived for seven years, in an unexplored area with no roads, no people, and no source of water for thousands of square miles. In this vast wilderness the Owenses began their zoology research, working along animals that had never before been exposed to humans. 

For the past 50 years, Paul Theroux has travelled to the far corners of the Earth - to China, Africa, the Pacific Islands, Russia, and elsewhere. In Deep South, he turns his gaze to a region much closer to his home. Travelling through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, he writes of the stunning landscapes he discovers - the deserts, the mountains, the Mississippi - and, above all, the lives of the people he meets.

In June 1867, Mark Twain set out for Europe and the Holy Land on the paddle steamer Quaker City. His enduring, no-nonsense guide for the first-time traveler also served as an antidote to the insufferably romantic travel books of the period.