Showing titles in Travel Writing & Commentary

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches...

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...

At 10.41am on a Tuesday morning in September, Mark Mason boards the number 1A bus at Land’s End in Cornwall. Forty-six buses and eleven days later he disembarks at John O’Groats in Scotland. Move Along Please is his account of that gruelling 1100-mile odyssey; a paint-by-bus-numbers portrait...

Lawrence Durrell's evocative memoir of living in Cyprus, just before the Greek/Turkish partition. This is a touching and atmospheric account of a place, now changed, where the two races lived side by side.

Brought to you by Penguin From the acclaimed author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia, comes a new journey, following four 19th century elephants marched from the East African coast towards Congo, to tell a heartbreaking story of folly and colonial greed. Featuring immersive field recordings...

Sam Manicom left his job, sold his house and his belongings, aiming to ride a motorbike the length of Africa. He'd been riding a motorcycle for just 3 months by the time he made it to the Sahara. But once the travel bug bit, he couldn't stop. 'Under Asian Skies', like his first book 'Into Africa', is packed with adventure. He narrowly escapes a serious wipe out in the vast Australian Outback, falls critically ill in Thailand and is rescued by a prostitute, gets arrested in Madras, dodges the manic traffic of India's Grand Trunk Road and rides sheet ice on the roads through Turkey.

From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the 20th century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.

Bloomsbury presents Wild Woman written and read by Philippa Forrester. 'Deeply personal and poignant' BBC Countryfile An engaging blend of conservation stories and humorous, personal anecdotes from Philippa Forrester about women who, like her, choose to live and work in the wild. In Wild Woman...

The delightfully comic account of a British couple and their imported cats starting over in a new country continues in Bucket to Greece: Volume 3. Victor and Marigold really feel the heat of May when the ever precarious water supply runs dry, and Victor suffers self-doubt over his burgeoning mastery of the Greek language. No longer cheffing at the local taverna, Victor keeps busy in the kitchen at home. With marriage on his mind, Barry plans a permanent move to Greece and joins Victor in an early-morning snail hunt, leading to the great bucket breakout.

Brought to you by Penguin. No sex. No kids. No future? When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later...

When Blake Farha was unexpectedly laid off, he knew the time had finally come to walk the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage stretching all the way across Spain. Armed with a cheap notebook, a ballpoint pen, and the ugliest pair of shoes he’d ever owned, he set out to fulfill a dream and to get a grip on the demons that have plagued him his entire life.

Brought to you by Penguin. In March 2022, Michael Palin travelled the length of the River Tigris through Iraq to get a sense of what life is like in a region of the world that once formed the cradle of civilisation, but that in recent times has witnessed turmoil and appalling bloodshed. It was a...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane, read by Roy McMillan SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE From the bestselling author of UNDERLAND, THE OLD WAYS and THE LOST WORDS 'Few books give such a...

Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger’s stunning account of five years spent crossing the Arabian Peninsula by foot and on camels, with nomadic Bedouin tribesmen as guides. Travelling between 1945 and 1950, the British explorer treks through Yemen, the Empty Quarter, Oman, and parts of the then Trucial States, crossing and re-crossing around 250,000 miles of this most inhospitable terrain. He was the first European ever to set eyes on the dunes and wadis of these deserts.

It’s exhausting, being Irish. The constant self-flagellation is enough to put anybody off their breakfast. Why are we so hard on ourselves? Is it the post-colonial overhang following centuries of oppression at the hands of a litany of foreign invaders? Or is it collective guilt for sending...

When Ted Simon rode 64,000 miles round the world on his 500c Triumph Tiger, he inspired thousands of motorcyclists to begin their own adventures, including Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, who chronicled their travels in Long Way Round. Nearly 30 years later, Ted Simon took to the road again to retrace the epic journey he made in his 40s. He meets up with old friends and acquaintances, revisits old landmarks and locations, and rediscovers himself, as well as the world, along the way.

Brought to you by Penguin. George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society. 'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached...

This is the account of a unique journey – a 600-mile trek on foot around Cyprus in the last year of the island's peace. Colin Thubron intertwines myth, history and personal anecdote in a quest from which the characters and places, architecture and landscape all spring vividly to the listener's ear.

'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'...

Now Then is a biographical mosaic of Yorkshire. Rick Broadbent, an award-wining author and exiled Yorkshireman, goes in search of the soul of England's biggest county and produces an all-encompassing portrait of a place that has been victimised and stereotyped since the days of Williams the Conqueror. Incorporating social history, memoir, reportage and author interviews, Now Then paints a picture of what it means to be from Yorkshire - both now and back then.