Essays & Travelogues

FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL PRIZE FOR HISTORY 'Not only deserves the description "epic", in its true sense, but the term "masterpiece" as well' Independent This gripping epic tells the story of one of the world's most critical failed...

It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together...

**AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4**'A master nature writer' (New York Times) provides the ultimate natural, social and cultural history of the Arctic landscape.The author of Horizon's classic work explores the Arctic landscape and the hold it continues to exert...

Bruce Chatwin provides a fascinating background to indigenous Australian life.The songlines are the invisible pathways that criss-cross Australia, tracks connecting communities and following ancient boundaries. Along these lines, Aboriginals passed the...

the best book on the Mafia in Sicily - its origins, its code of honour, its secrecy and its brutality. A chilling insight. - reveals how Mafia violence and corruption crept even into every aspect of Sicilian society, including the police and the church -...

In the spirit of T.E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger spent five years wandering the deserts of Arabia, producing Arabian Sands, 'a memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people'. The Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by...

'4 stars. Attlee, who knows and loves Italy and the Italians, takes the reader through the country's scented gardens with her sharp descriptions, pertinent stories and quotes and intriguing recipes. I was there with her' Anna del Conte, Sunday TelegraphA...

'Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it'. Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish...

In the summer of 1957, rebelling against her family and anxious to impress an admirer who had moved to Paris, Gill Johnson, aged twenty-five, gave up her comfortable job at the National Gallery in London and travelled to Venice to take up a job teaching...

Join John Rogers as he ventures out into an uncharted London like a redbrick Indiana Jones in search of the lost meaning of our metropolitan existence. Nursing two reluctant knees and a can of Stella, he perambulates through the seasons seeking adventure...

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2023**'Full of delightful anecdotes and interviews and fascinating historical tales' Mail on SundayA panoramic portrait of the wonderous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.A toy, a tool, a...

About the AuthorThor Heyerdahl was born in Norway in 1914. He received the Order of Merit or similar decorations from Peru, Italy, Egypt, Morocco, Bulgaria, Norway and Sweden. He wrote many books on early travel and sea exploration. He died in April 2002...

WINNER OF A SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 2021 A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE A SUNDAY TIMES AND FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Marks the birth of a new star of non-fiction' William Dalrymple 'A beautiful...

A Financial Times and Observer "best summer read" 'With its union of practicality and magic, a kitchen is a portal offering extended range and providing unlikely paths out of the ordinary. Offering opportunities to cook, imagine and create ways back...

Roger Deakin set out in 1996 to swim through the British Isles. The result a uniquely personal view of an island race and a people with a deep affinity for water. From the sea, from rock pools, from rivers and streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos,...

A sparkling new translation of one of the greatest travel books ever written: Marco Polo's seminal account of his journeys in the east, in a collectible clothbound edition. Marco Polo was the most famous traveller of his time. His voyages began in 1271...

WINNER: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER READER AWARD FOR BEST TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016WINNER: BOOKS ARE MY BAG READER AWARD FOR BEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR BIOGRAPHY 2016Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and...

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, millions of lives changed in an instant. Millions of people were suddenly on the move. In this great flow of people was a reporter from the north of Scotland. Jen Stout left Moscow abruptly, ending up on a border...

For Anna, a cycling enthusiast, the decision to ride 4,000 miles solo around the coast of the UK wasn't that hard. Following the river from London until it became the sea, then following the sea until it reached the mouth of the Thames again was a...

So this is surfing in Britain, I told myself as I grumpily walked up a slope of wet rocks and wispy beach grass, trying to keep a foothold as rain and wind both tried their utmost to send me skidding back down to the freezing beach below. Tom Anderson...

In the Steps of St. Paul dazzlingly retraces the apostle's famed journey of faith through Israel, Greece, and Italy, using the Bible itself as a guide. With an ear for good stories and an eye alert to detail, Morton creates a compulsively readable...

'Every year, hundreds of books on the city are published, but none resembles this one' - Independent 'This gem of a book offers practical advice but in a distinctly lyrical tone. If you are lucky enough to be going there, take Venice is a Fish and you...

Jan Morris (then James) first visited Trieste as a soldier at the end of the Second World War. Since then, the city has come to represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories. Here, her thoughts on a host of subjects -...

Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild examines the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who walked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and whose SOS note and emaciated corpse were found four months later.In April 1992, Chris McCandless set off alone into the...

'For God's sake look after our people' Captain Scott's harrowing account of his expedition to the South Pole in 1910-12 was first published in 1913. In his journals Scott records his party's optimistic departure from New Zealand, the hazardous voyage...

**Sunday Times Bestseller****Book of the Week on Radio 4**'A beautiful book about a part of the modern world which remains genuinely magical' Mark Haddon'One of the most constantly fascinating, but consistently under-appreciated aspects of modern life is...

Istanbul, through the mind of its most celebrated writer. ** PRE-ORDER NIGHTS OF PLAGUE, THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORHAN PAMUK **Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature'A declaration of love.' Sunday Times'A fascinating read for anyone who has even the...

An essential guide to the strange, sometimes sinister culture of contemporary Italy.When Tobias Jones first travelled to Italy, he expected to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors and famous writers. Instead, he...

'Could you show me a djinn?' I asked. 'Certainly,' replied the Sufi. 'But you would run away.' From the author of the Samuel Johnson prize shortlisted 'The Return of a King', this is William Dalrymple's captivating memoir of a year spent in...

One summer, Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way - a challenging 256-mile route usually approached from south to north, with the sun, wind and rain at your back. However, he resolved to tackle it back to front, walking home towards the...

Over two decades of turmoil and change in the Middle East, steered via the history-soaked landscape of Palestine. This new edition includes a previously unpublished epigraph in the form of a walk. When Raja Shehadeh first started hill walking in...

The Good Life goes on at El Valero. Find yourself laughing out loud as Chris is instructed by his daughter on local teenage mores; bluffs his way in art history to millionaire Bostonians; is rescued off a snowy peak by the Guardia Civil; and joins an...

Beyond the booze and the bratwurst: what football really tells us about Germany Germany is one of the world's great footballing powers. Four-time World Cup winners, Euro 2024 hosts and home to clubs like Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, the...

An award-winning epic on the birth of AustraliaIn 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonise Australia.Documenting the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian...

'Crackles and sparks with life like an exploding box of Diwali fireworks' -William Dalrymple'One can only envy Monisha Rajesh as she embarks on this epic journey' -Tim ParksWhen she was a child, Monisha Rajesh's family uprooted to Madras in the hope of...

A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, heard in Hollywood films and on state occasions, his music inspires particular devotion. Some believe it helps heal...

'His account of their "foodie family road trip" establishes Booth as the next Bill Bryson.' New York TimesJapan is the pre-eminent food nation on earth. The creativity of the Japanese, their dedication and ingenuity, not to mention courage in the face of...

It's two decades since Chris Stewart moved to his farm on the wrong side of a river in the mountains of southern Spain and his daughter Chloee is preparing to fly the nest for university. In this latest, typically hilarious dispatch from El Valero we...

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be given your own remote islands? Thirty years ago it happened to Adam Nicolson. Aged 21, Nicolson inherited the Shiants, three lonely Hebridean islands set in a dangerous sea off the Isle of...

Jeremy Clarkson shares his opinions on just about everything in The World According to Clarkson.Jeremy Clarkson has seen rather more of the world than most. He has, as they say, been around a bit. And as a result, he's got one or two things to tell us...