Essays & Travelogues

When poet and biographer Grevel Lindop takes up salsa dancing in rainy Manchester, all he has are size 12 feet and excruciating adolescent memories of ballroom dancing lessons. But salsa has a way of getting into your blood. Intense and intimate, sexy...

'Tim and I both understood we had done something really stupid. We had underestimated the danger involved in going out to sea. We had no radio, compass, life raft or flares. In other words, we were a couple of idiots.' This is the story of Shane and...

'Sicily struck me then as the most fascinating place I had ever visited. I didn't change that opinion over the intervening years, no matter where I travelled. I meant to go back. Time and again I made plans. Time and again I was thwarted.' At the age of...

Danny Wallace is about to turn thirty and his life has become a cliche. Recently married and living in a smart new area of town, he's swapped pints for lattes and had even contemplated buying coasters. Something wasn't right - he was feeling way too...

Fast forward to the 21st century and Tony has left these heady music biz days behind. That cherished appearance on 'Top of the Pops' is but a distant memory. These days music is just a hobby. That is until it is suggested that Tony is a One Hit Wonder...

Between 1804 and 1806 Meriwether Lewis and William Clarke led the great westward expedition up the Missouri. This book is an account of the author's own trip of the same route, by an assortment of river steamers and barges, and his encounters with...

A book of Irish journies, both real and imagined, as the author (believing himself to be an East Midlands version of Jack Kerouac) sits in pubs and listens to old men's stories, laughs at and falls in love with mad Irishwomen, sings folksongs, cries in...

In June 1992, author Roy Moxham did a very strange thing: he wrote to a bandit in an Indian jail. Phoolan Devi was the controversial and charismatic 'Bandit Queen' hailed as a modern-day Robin Hood in the villages surrounding Delhi. In revenge for her...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781740334938Author Kate McLeodFormat PaperbackPage Count 32Imprint Dorling Kindersley AustraliaPublisher Penguin Books AustraliaWeight(grams) 151g

Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisher* Unexpected stories from unexpected places. Many places can feel like nowhere: a desert, an isolated village, even the middle of a bustling, impersonal city. And then something happens: an...

'My name is Stuart Maconie, and I am from the North Of England. Some time ago, I was standing in my kitchen, rustling up a Sunday brunch for some very hungover, very Northern mates who were 'down' for the weekend. One of them was helping me out and,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780954269005Author Archie MilesFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint Beacon Hill HousePublisher Beacon Hill House

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781871060324Format PaperbackImprint Devon BooksPublisher Halsgrove

Gary Sutherland was a lapsed golfer, until he acquired his late dad's putter. After studying a crumpled golf map of Scotland, Gary decided to embark on a voyage. His target was to play 18 rounds of golf on 18 Scottish islands in honour of his dad, a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780955211904Author Ian Stephen StallardFormat PaperbackPage Count 88Imprint Ian StallardPublisher Ian Stallard

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780984835003Author Wendy HinmanFormat PaperbackPage Count 388Imprint Wendy E. HinmanPublisher Wendy E. HinmanWeight(grams) 517gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm...

Paul Bowles began travelling the moment he could - leaving America as a teenager to visit Gertrude Stein in Paris. He settled in Morocco after the war, and for thirty years travelled in North Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia, Indian and Sri Lanka...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780955312410Author Ian MathieFormat HardbackPage Count 232Imprint Live Wire BooksPublisher Live Wire Books

French Lessons serves up another hilarious slice of life as it is lived in rural France - but only by the disaster-prone author and his long-suffering wife. The seventh book in the immensely popular series about a British couple scraping a living in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780802137289Author Ronald WrightFormat PaperbackPage Count 464Imprint Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly PressPublisher Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press

Stalked by crocodiles, charged by hippos, attacked by African killer bees, Mark Jenkins tells of the first descent of the Niger River in West Africa. In 1991 author Mark Jenkins, along with three companions and an intuitive African guide, set out to find...

It was the legendary traveller Wilfred Thesiger who first introduced Gavin Young to the Marshes of Iraq. Since then Young has been entranced by both the beauty of the Marshes and by the Marsh Arabs who inhabit them, a people whose lifestyle is almost...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780452285019Author Danny WallaceFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint PlumePublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 293gDimensions(mm) 202mm * 134mm * 19mm

Who are you going to call if it all goes wrong on holiday?Meet Doctor Ben MacFarlane. His job is to bring people back to Britain after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong...

The first international motor rally from Peking to Paris took place in the summer of 1907. Only five cars were involved, and the crews wrote their agreed code of conduct on the back of a menu the night before the start. Their only navigational aids were...

A non-political travel book about South Africa which seeks to capture the natural beauty of the region and offer a portrait of a nation in the process of rebuilding itself. The author won the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book of the Year Award with...

One clear morning in May, Nick Thorpe left his Edinburgh flat, ducked off the commuter route and hitched a ride aboard a little white canal boat, heading west towards the sea. It was the first mutinous step in a delightful boat-hopping odyssey that would...

This is a collection of Wilfred Thesiger's greatest journeys - in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the marshes of Iraq, the mountains of the Hindu Kush and Kurdistan, and the Yemen - illustrated with Thesiger's own photographs.Book InformationISBN...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780957154872Author Joanne TeagueFormat PaperbackPage Count 292Imprint Candy Jar BooksPublisher Candy Jar Books

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781613838228Author Michael OndaatjeFormat HardbackImprint Perfection LearningPublisher Perfection LearningWeight(grams) 227g

The drive would take fifteen hours, a slow meander up virtually the entire length of Britain. Not having the first idea what was required for my six-month sojourn as a crofter on the west coast of Scotland, I had opted to take along pretty much...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780811810814Author John MillerFormat HardbackPage Count 224Imprint Chronicle BooksPublisher Chronicle BooksWeight(grams) 326g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780552776233Author Bill BrysonFormat PaperbackPage Count 544Imprint Corgi BooksPublisher Transworld Publishers Ltd

What started out as an innocent board game inspired Rich Smith to undertake a daring crime spree across the United States - a journey to break the dumbest American laws on the statute books. In the Land of the Free, it is illegal to: - Lie down and fall...

Mayes invites us back to Tuscany for a new season of friendship, festivity and food. She is now truly at home, learning a new language and touring neighbouring towns, villages and islands, delving into gardening, wine-making and the experience of...

Through the retelling of people's personal stories and experiences, this cultural and confessional journey into the heart of the Anglo-Indian community in India, a caste held in contempt by the British and Indians alike, unsettles our received ideas...

Mike Golding's account of breaking Chay Blyth's 22-year-old record for sailing solo nonstop the wrong way round the world against the prevailing winds and currents, and winning the Group 4 Securitas sponsored Global Challenge Trophy.Book InformationISBN...

Ferdinand Dennis' travels around West Africa for his BBC Radio 4 series "Journey Round My People", visiting Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra, Leone, Cameroon, Liberia, Guinea and Ghana, are the subject of this book. The author evokes the atmosphere,...

A fusion of biography, travel writing and nostalgia. Nigel Williams re-enacts Jerome K. Jerome's classic river journey with Alan Yentob, Controller of BBC 1 and Williams's boss, and his dog, Badger.Book InformationISBN 9780340590478Author Nigel...

Having given up a high-powered job and the lifestyle to match, Tessa Hainsworth had no idea how hard she would struggle when, full of optimism, she fulfilled her dream of moving to rural Cornwall with her young family one September. Within months, she is...