Essays & Travelogues

For many years war made Sierra Leone and Liberia too dangerous for outsiders to travel through. Facing down demons from his time in Africa as a journalist, Tim Butcher heads deep into this combat zone, encountering the devastation wrought by lawless...

Hundreds of hardy people have tried to carve out a living in the Alaskan bush, but few have succeeded as consistently as Heimo Korth. In The Final Frontiersman, Heimo's cousin James Campbell chronicles Korth's amazing life and adventures, creating a...

In Edge of the Orison the visionary Iain Sinclair walks in the steps of poet John Clare.In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a...

Around the year 1885, Alfred Barnard was secretary of Harper's Weekly Gazette, a journal which featured facets of the wine and spirit trade. In order to provide his readers with the history and detailed descriptions of the whisky-making process, Barnard...

Everyone talks about 'Middle England'. Sometimes they mean something bad, like a lynch mob of Daily Mail readers, and sometimes they mean something good, like a pint of ale in a sleepy Cotswold village in summer twilight. But just where and what is...

Everyone talks about 'Middle England'. Sometimes they mean something bad, like a lynch mob of Daily Mail readers, and sometimes they mean something good, like a pint of ale in a sleepy Cotswold village in summer twilight. But just where and what is...

Between 1929 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh travelled widely and wrote four books about his experiences. In this collection he writes, with his customary wit and perception, about a cruise around the Mediterranean; a train trip from Djibouti to Abyssinia to...

It is a popular misconception that Hamburg is a coastal city. In fact, despite possessing Europe s second-busiest port, this 'amphibious city' lies some 65 miles from the North Sea. Its long-standing image as a 'city without culture' is also something of...

Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at...

Communist Albania was unlike any other European nation. It was a 'hermit state' ruled by a dictator, Enver Hoxha, who presided over a repressive Stalinist regime. When John Watkins visited Albania in the late 1980s, he saw peasants toiling in the fields...

In 2004 Charley Boorman completed his astonishing round-the-world bike trip with his friend, Ewan McGregor. The journey left him exhausted, exhilarated and hungry for a new challenge. And what greater challenge than the Dakar rally? Beginning in Lisbon...

In 2004 Charley Boorman completed his astonishing round-the-world bike trip with his friend, Ewan McGregor. The journey left him exhausted, exhilarated and hungry for a new challenge. And what greater challenge than the Dakar rally? Beginning in Lisbon...

When Mike Tomkies moved to a remote cottage on the shores of Loch Shiel in the West Highlands of Scotland, he found a place which was to provide him with the most profound wilderness experience of his life. Accessible only by boat, the cottage he renamed...

"It remains one of the most penetrating and illuminating books on the island's elusive, alluring culture." - National GeographicA House in Bali tells the fascinating story of renowned writer and composer Colin McPhee's obsession with Balinese gamelan...

For two years Monica Connell lived as a paying guest of Kalchu and Chola in the Nepalese Himalayan village of Talphi, ten days walk from the nearest road. This book poetically captures the immediacy of Connell's experience, and her empathy and sense of...

What is a meaningful life? What does it mean to flourish? Antonia Case, the co-founder of New Philosopher and Womankind magazines, quits her corporate job in the city and, with her partner, travels across the world in search of meaning. In a quest to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307390691Author Mark RichardsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm) 203mm...

The book opens on the day Hemingway's close friend Pop, a legendary hunter, leaves him in charge of the camp. Tensions have heightened among the various tribes and news arrives of a potential attack on the hunters, forcing Hemingway not only to take on...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780767903820Author Bill BrysonFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing GroupPublisher Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group...

***Shortlisted for the Great Outdoors Book of the Year***Surviving in the wild takes a great deal of strength. Often faced with frozen tundra, sweltering deserts, humid jungles, perilous mountains and fast-flowing rivers, Megan Hine is no stranger to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781781725580Author Peter FinchFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint SerenPublisher Poetry Wales Press

'Like Shakespeare, Dickens was able to embrace a whole world' John MortimerWhen Charles Dickens set out for America in 1842, he was the most famous man of his day to make the journey, and embarked on his travels with an intense curiosity. His frank...

The original India Pale Ale was pure gold in a glass; a semi-mythical beer specially invented, in the 19th century, to travel halfway around the world, through storms and tropical sunshine, and arrive in perfect condition for a long, cold drink on an...

'The point of all this has nothing to do with finding yourself. It's about what you can do to lose what you don't need.' It's a dark rainy afternoon on Dublin's jammed M50 motorway. The rain is hammering on the windscreen of Daniella Moyles' car. She...

Richard Grant has never spent more than twenty-two consecutive nights under the same roof. Motivated partly by his own wanderlust and partly by his realisation that America is a land populated by wanderers, he set out to test his theory. AMERICAN NOMADS...

Richard Grant has never spent more than twenty-two consecutive nights under the same roof. Motivated partly by his own wanderlust and partly by his realisation that America is a land populated by wanderers, he set out to test his theory. AMERICAN NOMADS...

In Yorkshire: There and Back, Andrew Martin celebrates Britain's most charismatic county, looking back at the Yorkshire of his 1970s childhood and as it is today.Journeying to every historic corner, Martin writes affectionally about its past, present and...

'Get away from here before you're completely bewitched and enslaved...' Dorothy Carrington was told, while sitting in a fisherman's cafe at the magically quiet midday hour. But enslaved she was. GRANITE ISLAND, much more than a travel book, grew out of...

Shortly after the 2005 London bombings, Tahir Shah was thrown into a Pakistani prison on suspicion of spying for Al-Qaeda. What sustained him during his terrifying, weeks-long ordeal were the stories his father told him as a child in Morocco.Inspired by...

Shortly after the 2005 London bombings, Tahir Shah was thrown into a Pakistani prison on suspicion of spying for Al-Qaeda. What sustained him during his terrifying, weeks-long ordeal were the stories his father told him as a child in Morocco.Inspired by...

Life at Full Tilt is a whirlwind tour of Dervla Murphy s travels. It begins in Spain in 1956, before her first book, and follows in her tracks for over fifty years, including descriptions of her beloved Afghanistan in 1963, of the Peruvian Andes, of...

'An epic story of hardship, friendship and faith.' Daily Telegraph Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, this is the compelling account of the most recent adventure of the bestselling author of Facing Up. It started out as a...

Born in London to a Turkish mother and British father, Alev Scott moved to Istanbul to discover what it means to be Turkish in a country going through rapid political and social change, with an extraordinary past still linked to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and...

In the critically acclaimed Desert Divers and Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist travelled through Africa's deserts and unearthed the cruelty of colonialism. Now he has done the same for Australia. Lindqvist travels through the south of the...

A compulsively readable account of an African country now virtually inaccessible to the outside world and one journalist's daring and adventurous journey.When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa he quickly became obsessed...

When ten Pakistani men walk into Kathleen Jamie's small Scottish town on a peace march, in November 2001, she is thrown back to her own travels in Northern Pakistan and a book she wrote a decade earlier. Among Muslims is the account of Jamie's time...

In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new 'destination' in Italy. While many of its more esoteric features are on display for all to see the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski's portrait of this...

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOWIn 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a...

From the author of India: A Portrait, Patrick French's Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land has been acclaimed as the book that showed the real Tibet for the first time. Tibet has long fascinated the West, but what really lies beyond our...

At the age of 23, Ash Dykes became the first person to walk, solo and unsupported, across Mongolia.His journey took 78 days and saw him trek over the Altai Mountains, the Gobi Desert and the Mongolian Steppe. It was an expedition filled with danger and...