Essays & Travelogues

Paraguay - the name conjures up everything most exotic and extreme in South America. It's a place of hellish jungles, dictators, fraudsters and Nazis, utopian experiments, missionaries and lurid coups. It's not a place for the timid tourist. It doesn't...

A Times, Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year 2023'Illuminates some of the great trends of our time' - Gideon Rachman, Financial Times'Vivid, urgent and unsettling' - Tom Holland, author of Dominion_____What does it now mean to call yourself...

Life and love, olive groves and bee hives in Provence - further adventures in the bestselling Olive Farm series. After sixteen months of travelling round the Mediterranean in search of the ancient secrets of the olive tree, Carol returns to her beloved...

London Orbital is Iain Sinclair's exceptional voyage of discovery into the unloved outskirts of the city'My book of the year. Sentence for sentence, there is no more interesting writer at work in English' John Lanchester, Daily TelegraphEncircling London...

London Orbital is Iain Sinclair's exceptional voyage of discovery into the unloved outskirts of the city'My book of the year. Sentence for sentence, there is no more interesting writer at work in English' John Lanchester, Daily TelegraphEncircling London...

A trailblazing collection of writing from Binyavanga Wainaina's extraordinary life 'In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it...

'Like rotting stakes in a forest clearing' The great journalist of conflict in the Third World finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-War PolandPenguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the...

'Slowly Down the Ganges' is seen as a vintage Newby masterpiece, alongside 'A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush' and 'Love and War in the Apennines'. Told with Newby's self-deprecating humour and wry attention to detail, this is a classic of the genre and a...

Twelve-year-old Hans Thomas lives alone with his father, a man who likes to give his son lessons about life and has a penchant for philosophy. Hans Thomas' mother left when he was four (to 'find' herself) and the story begins when father and son set off...

In this acclaimed exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit travels through Ireland, the land of her long-forgotten maternal ancestors. A Book of Migrations portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization,...

'The master of a journalistic style long vanished - urbane, lucid, courteous... A masterpiece of observation and storytelling' Ian McEwanMitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his...

My Family and Other Enemies is part travelogue, part memoir that dives into the hinterland of Croatia. Mary Novakovich explores her ongoing relationship with the region of Lika in central Croatia, where her parents were born.. 'Lika is little known to...

A compendium of travel writing from a master travellerPaul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveller. Part philosophical guide, part...

A compendium of travel writing from a master travellerPaul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveller. Part philosophical guide, part...

One small East African country embodies the battered history of the continent: patronised by colonialists, riven by civil war, confused by Cold War manoeuvring, proud, colorful, with Africa's best espresso and worst rail service. Michela Wrong...

SELECTED BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND DAUNTS BOOKS AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023ONE OF PROSPECT'S POLITICS & REPORTAGE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023SHORTLISTED FOR EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR'Exquisite . . . A genuine, melancholy masterpiece'...

In April 2008, Ed Stafford began his attempt to become the first man ever to walk the entire length of the River Amazon. Nearly two and a half years later, he had crossed the whole of South America to reach the mouth of the colossal river.With danger a...

The Silver Invicta is a stream of impressions from a fishing life, in its varying moods, coloured with plenty of whisky and eccentric company. Join Tom Harland on his light-hearted journeys with his fly rod; take part in his triumphs and disasters on...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907970726Author John McPheeFormat PaperbackPage Count 448Imprint Daunt BooksPublisher Daunt BooksWeight(grams) 450g

'Both moving and hilarious' Spectator, Books of the Year'A tale of gloriously eccentric British pensioners. Aitken rivals Alan Bennett in the ear he has for an eavesdropped remark ... boy, can he write.' Daily Mail, Book of the WeekFROM THE AUTHOR OF THE...

'Both moving and hilarious' Spectator, Books of the Year'A tale of gloriously eccentric British pensioners. Aitken rivals Alan Bennett in the ear he has for an eavesdropped remark ... boy, can he write.' Daily Mail, Book of the WeekFROM THE AUTHOR OF THE...

In 2016 Scottish writer Iain Maloney and his Japanese wife Minori moved to a village in rural Japan. This is the story of his attempt to fit in, be accepted and fulfil his duties as a member of the community, despite being the only foreigner in the...

An international bestseller upon publication, MAXIMUM CITY was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and remains a classic study of the metropolis of Bombay. 'If there's been a more striking snapshot of the changing face of Asia, I've never read it' Sunday...

An international bestseller upon publication, MAXIMUM CITY was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and remains a classic study of the metropolis of Bombay. 'If there's been a more striking snapshot of the changing face of Asia, I've never read it' Sunday...

The story of a man's obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey - from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching. All his life, Philip Hoare has been...

Remember when you were a kid, and you used to go round to a friend's house to see if they were playing? Well, as adults we're not supposed to do that. Which is a shame... because Dave Gorman likes playing. He REALLY likes games. So he knocked on the...

This book is for all those who love Kim, that masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here...

This is London in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers, witch-doctors and sex workers. This is London in the voices of Arabs, Afghans, Nigerians, Poles, Romanians and Russians.This is London as you've never seen it before...

Perfect for taking on vacation or as preparatory reading before a visit - or as entertainment for lovers of London and literature. Compiled by Robin Saikia, a London-based writer and journalist.Book InformationISBN 9781905131440Author Robin SaikiaFormat...

Guy Grieve's life was going nowhere - trapped in a job he hated, commuting 2,000 miles a month and up to his neck in debt. But he dreamed of escaping it all to live alone in one of the wildest, most remote places on earth - Alaska. And just when he'd...

A wonderfully original book about contemporary Russia as seen on journeys in search of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Chekhov, Gogol and Turgenev.SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDWARD STANDFORD TRAVEL WRITING AWARD 2020With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides...

Paul Richardson's mission - 'to sieve out the ancient, perverse and eccentric from the new, nice and normal' - took him from coastal plain to mountainous peak. It also took him, often, by surprise. From ritual pig killings to wood-chopping competitions,...

WINNER OF THE 2014 THWAITES WAINWRIGHT PRIZEIn the past, Hugh Thomson has written acclaimed books about Peru, Mexico and the Indian Himalaya. Now he returns to the most exotic and foreign country of them all - his own. Walking right across England, along...

At the beginning of the 1980s Neil Ansell lived in a series of squats and derelict buildings across London. Becoming part of a floating community of rough sleepers and volunteers, who found purpose in providing companionship and support for one another...

'I was fascinated, moved and entertained by every page. This is the kind of book the world needs right now' DONAL RYAN_______________'My dictionary's first two definitions of 'comrade' are:A close companion.An intimate associate or friend.The third one...

Oi, mate, is that monstrosity diesel? From the author of the bestsellers Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse and This Is Not a Drill, this is the eagerly awaited next installment of Paul Carter's rollicking...

In an adventure of a lifetime, Alexander Armstrong wraps up warm and heads ever north to explore the hostile Arctic winter - the glittering landscape of Scandinavia, the isolated islands of Iceland and Greenland, and the final frontier of Canada and...

A woman stands at the edge of a cliff, looking out to sea and the horizon. Dancers welcome the sun in a circle of stones. A dowsing road turns without warning. A church bell. Footsteps.Old Weird Albion is America writer Justin Hopper's dark love song to...

What would happen if you took some of Britain's best writing talent, put them on a plane and flew them to one of the most extraordinary and inaccessible places on the planet? What would happen if you took Irvine Welsh from the streets of Edinburgh and...

When Suzanna Clarke and her husband bought a dilapidated house in the Moroccan town of Fez, their friends thought they were mad. Located in a maze of donkey-trod alleyways, the house - a traditional riad - was beautiful but in desperate need of repair...