Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Terry Darlington

At seventy-five, Terry and Monica Darlington had done everything they could think of doing, including starting a business and becoming athletes and running a literary society.Lately they had become boating adventurers and Terry a bestselling writer. But in their Midlands canal town in November, life was looking dull and short on surprises. 
Then their famous canal boat was destroyed by fire. Within a few days they had bought a new one and soon headed north in the Phyllis May 2 – to Liverpool, Lancaster, the Pennines and Wigan Pier. Terry recorded the journey, and alongside it the story of his life and his marriage and his dog Jim, with his broken ear like a flat cap, and Monica’s dog Jess, known with heartbreaking reason as the Flying Catastrophe. 
Funny, affecting and beautifully told, this is a story that brims with incident and excitement, and is full of the famous and fascinating people the Darlingtons have met - a story of an adventurous life well lived.

Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier

Sarah MacDonald

After backpacking her way around India, 21-year-old Sarah Macdonald decided that she hated this land of chaos and contradiction with a passion, and when an airport beggar read her palm and insisted she would come back one day - and for love - she vowed never to return. 
 
But twelve years later the prophecy comes true when her partner, ABC's South Asia correspondent, is posted to New Delhi, the most polluted city on earth. Having given up a blossoming radio career in Sydney to follow her new boyfriend to India, it seems like the ultimate sacrifice and it almost kills Sarah - literally. After being cursed by a sadhu smeared in human ashes, she nearly dies from double pneumonia. It's enough to send a rapidly balding atheist on a wild rollercoaster ride through India's many religions in search of the meaning of life and death. 
 
From the 'brain enema' of a meditation retreat in Dharamsala to the biggest Hindu festival on earth on the steps of the Ganges in Varanasi, and with the help of the Dalai Lama, a goddess of healing hugs and a couple of Bollywood stars - among many, many others - Sarah discovers a hell of a lot more.

Holy Cow!

An Indian Adventure

Peter Moore

Question: What do you do when you're dumped by the Girl Next Door? 
Answer: Throw yourself into another madcap adventure and travel from Cape Town to Cairo... 
A week after breaking up with the GND (his travelling companion through Central America) Peter Moore heads off to Africa to lose himself for a while. In the grand tradition of 19th-century scoundrelas, explorers and romantics, Africa strikes him as the ideal place to find solitude and anonymity in the face of a personal crisis. 
What follows is Peter's journey from one end of the Dark Continent to the other. Travelling the fabled Cape Town to Cairo route by any means of transport he can blag (or if he must, pay) his way onto, it's an epic trek that sees our intrepid Antipodean experience everything from the southernmost city in Africa to the Pyramids, vast game parks and thundering falls, cosmopolitan cities and tiny villages as he journeys through the very heart of Africa. And travelling on his own, it's inevitable that Peter falls in with a motley cast of characters and has a myriad misadventures: including coming face to face with a wild Hyena with very bad breath, crossing the treacherous Sani Pass, the highest in Africa, narrowly escaping a riot by hiding in a coffin shop, saving oil-covered Penguins in South Africa, acting as an extra in a WW2 epic, not to mention dodging 20,000 single woman trying to catch the eye of the king of Swaziland during the annual Reed Dance. And then there was the time when he was kicked out of Robert Mugabe's birthday bash at gunpoint...

Swahili For The Broken-Hearted

Rosemary Bailey

'I wake to the sun striking gold on a stone wall. If I lean out of the window I can see Mount Canigou newly iced with snow. It is wonderful to live in a building with windows all around, to see both sunrise and sunset, to be constantly aware of the passage of the sun and moon.' 
 
In 1988, Rosemary Bailey and her husband were travelling in the French Pyrenees when they fell in love with, and subsequently bought, a ruined medieval monastery, surrounded by peach orchards and snow-capped peaks. Traces of the monks were everywhere, in the frescoed 13th century chapel, the buried crypt, the stone arches of the cloister. 
 
For the next few years the couple visited Corbiac whenever they could, until in 1997, they took the plunge and moved from central London to rural France with their six-year-old son. Entirely reliant on their earnings as freelance writers, they put their Apple Macs in the room with the fewest leaks and sent Theo to the village school. With vision and determination they have restored the monastery to its former glory, testing their relationship and resolve to the limit, and finding unexpected inspiration in the place. 
 
Life in a Postcard is not just Rosemary Bailey's enthralling account of the challenges of life in a small mountain community, but also a celebration of the rugged beauty of French Catalonia, the pleasures of Catalan cooking, and an exploration of an alternative, often magical world.

Life In A Postcard

'WE COULD BORE OURSELVES TO DEATH, DRINK OURSELVES TO DEATH, OR HAVE A BIT OF AN ADVENTURE...' 
 
When they retired Terry and Monica Darlington decided to sail their canal narrowboat across the Channel and down to the Mediterranean, together with their whippet Jim. They took advice from experts, who said they would die, together with their whippet Jim. 
 
On the Phyllis May you dive through six-foot waves in the Channel, are swept down the terrible Rhône, and fight for your life in a storm among the flamingos of the Camargue. 
You meet the French nobody meets - poets, captains, historians, drunks, bargees, men with guns, scholars, madmen - they all want to know the people on the painted boat and their narrow dog. 
You visit the France nobody knows - the backwaters of Flanders, the canals beneath Paris, the heavenly Yonne, the lost Burgundy Canal, the islands of the Saône, and the forbidden ways to the Mediterranean. 
 
Aliens, dicks, trolls, vandals, gongoozlers, killer fish and the walking dead all stand between our three innocents and their goal - many-towered Carcassonne.

Narrow Dog To Carcassonne

Alice Steinbach

American journalist Alice Steinbach took a year off to live in four cities - Paris, Venice, London and Oxford - when she realized she had entered a new phase of life. Her sons had graduated from college; she had been divorced for a long time; she was a successful journalist. While there was nothing really wrong with her life, she felt restless. Could she live independently of her family, her friends, her career? 
Steinbach searches for the answer to this provocative question firstly in Paris, where she finds a soul mate in a Japanese man; in Milan, where she befriends a young woman about to marry, and in the evocative cities of Oxford and Venice. Her trip is peppered with accounts of the exotic strangers she meets, her reflections on life and the observational postcards she wrote to herself during her year away. 
Colourful, inspiring and beautifully told, Without Reservations will take the reader on a unique voyage of discovery into a woman's life, as she evolves a new one.

Without Reservations

The Travels Of An Independent Woman

Polly Evans

At the age of thirty-four, Polly Evans finally fulfilled a childhood dream - to learn how to ride a horse. But rather than do so conveniently close to home, she decided to travel to Argentina and saddle up among the gauchos. 
 
Overcoming battered limbs, a steed hell-bent on bolting, and an encounter with the teeth of one very savage dog, Polly cantered through Andean vineyards and galloped beneath snow-capped Patagonian peaks. She survived a hair-raising game of polo and a back-breaking day herding cattle. 
 
Taking a break from riding, she delved into Argentina's tumultuous history: the Europeans' first terrifying acquaintances with the native 'giants'; the sanguinary demise of the early missionaries; and the gruesome drama of Evita's wandering corpse. 
 
On a Hoof and Prayer is the stampeding story of Polly's journey from timorous equestrian novice to wildly whooping cowgirl. It's a tale of ponies, painkillers and peregrinations - not just around present-day Argentina, but also into the country's glorious and turbulent past.

On A Hoof And A Prayer

Around Argentina At A Gallop

Intrepid travel writer Peter Moore recently invited the new love of his life, a.k.a. the girl next door, to join him on a romantic sojourn through Central America. The trip would take them into an area of the world emerging from decades of civil war, an area racked with poverty, disease and natural disasters. Naturally, she jumped at the chance. 
 
Over the next six months they battled hurricanes, mosquitoes, uncooperative border officials and over-sexed Mexican commuters, and along the way they learnt rather more about each other than they really wanted to... From Zapatista rebel heartlands in Mexico to a quiet game of cricket in Jamaica, from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch in Honduras to breathtaking ancient Mayan sites and perfect golden Caribbean beaches, The Full Montezuma chronicles the highs and lows of one couple's journey into the unknown. Written with Moore's wicked sense of humour and his eye for the bizarre, and punctuated by a roll call of annoying habits - map-hogging, over packing, bite-scratching and over-zealous haggling - The Full Montezuma is hilarious, incisive and acutely observed, a cautionary tale for anyone planning to cross a continent with their significant other.

The Full Montezuma

Having survived their voyage to Carcassonne, you might expect pensioners Terry and Monica Darlington and their whippet, Jim, to retire to a comfortable corner of their favourite pub. But no, they looked to the New World for an extraordinary new adventure... 
No-one had ever sailed an English narrowboat in the US before, for reasons that became abundantly clear during the 9-month voyage of the Phyllis May - including 30-mile sea crossings, blasting heat, tornadoes, hurricanes and all manner of intimidating wildlife. But the real danger came from the locals: the Good Ole Boys and Girls of the Deep South. Colonels, bums, captains, planters, heroes, drunks, gongoozlers, dancing dicks and beautiful spies - they all want to meet the Brits on the narrow painted boat and their thin dog and take them home and party them to death. Beautifully written, lovingly observed, and very funny, Narrow Dog to Indian River takes you on a dangerous, surprising and always entertaining journey as a thousand miles of the little-known South-East Seaboard unfold at six miles an hour- the golden marshes of the Carolinas, the incomparable cities of Charleston and Savannah, and the lost arcadias of Georgia and Florida.

Narrow Dog to Indian River

Tahir Shah

Look into the eyes of a jinn and you stare into the depths of your own soul... 
Writer and film-maker Tahir Shah - in his 30s, married, with two small children - was beginning to wilt under brash, cramped, ennervating British city life. Flying in the face of friends' advice, he longed to fulfil his dream of finding a place bursting with life, colour, history and romance - somewhere far removed from London - in which to raise a family. Childhood memories of holidaying with his parents, and of a grandfather he barely knew, led him to Morocco and to 'Dar Khalifa', a sprawling and, with the exception of its jinns, long-abandoned residence on the edge of Casablanca's shanty town that, rumour had it, once belonged to the city's Caliph. 
And so begins Tahir Shah's gloriously vivid, funny, affectionate and compelling account of how he and his family - aided, abetted and so often hindered by a wonderful cast of larger-than-life local characters: guardians, gardeners, builders, artisans, bureacrats and police (not forgetting the jinns, the spirits that haunt the house) - returned the Caliph's House to its former glory and learned to make this most exotic and alluring of countries their home. 
The Caliph's House is a story of home-ownership abroad - full of the attendant dramas, anxieties and frustrations - but it is also much more. Woven into the narrative is the author's own journey of self-discovery, of learning about a grandfather he hardly knew, and of coming to love the magical, multi-faceted, contradictory country that is Morocco.

The Caliph's House

Frank Gardner

Lost on a remote Sumatran volcano...pursued through a Tokyo backstreet by a Japanese gangster...picnicking with the French Foreign Legion in the Horn of Africa: Frank Gardner's idea of a holiday is not everyone's. But ever since his student days, the BBC security correspondent has done some epicly hard travelling in a remarkable number of countries. Drawing on the diaries, sketches and photos he kept during his travels, his immaculately observed accounts of these often strange, sometimes daring, adventures form the backbone of his new book. 
 
In June 2004, while on what should have been a routine assignment in Riyadh, his life - never mind his ability to travel the world - was nearly brought to a violent end by Islamist gunmen. Frank survived against all the odds and through force of will, has found himself looking towards far horizons once more. He's not only been skiing in the Alps, scuba diving in the Red Sea and explored the jungles of Cambodia, he is also reporting once more from far-flung destinations like Afghanistan and Colombia - and this is a man who no longer has the use of his legs... 
 
This is Frank Gardner's compelling, personal account of the myriad adventures that made him the man he was on that fateful day - and of the journeys he's made since, and how they've helped him to become the remarkable and inspiring individual he is today.

Far Horizons

Robert Whitaker

In 1735 a team of French scientists set out on a daring expedition into the South American wilderness to resolve one of the great scientific challenges of the time: the precise size and shape of the Earth. Scaling the Andes and journeying along the Amazon, the mapmakers faced all manner of danger, while madness, disease and violent death each took their toll. However one, Jean Godin, fell in love with a local girl called Isabel Grameson. When the time came for the expedition to return to France, Godin travelled ahead to ensure the way was safe for his new family. But on reaching French Guiana, disaster struck: Spain and Portugal closed their borders and he was stranded, unable to return to Isabel. What followed lies at the core of this extraordinary tale - a heartbreaking 20-year separation that ended when Isabel, believing she might never see her husband again, decided to make her own way across the continent: a journey that began in hope but became hell on earth... 
Drawing on his own experience retracing Isabel's epic trek as well as contemporary records, Robert Whitaker recounts a captivating true story of love and survival set against the backdrop of what many still regard as 'the greatest expedition the world has ever known'.

The Mapmaker's Wife

A True Tale Of Love, Murder And Survival In The Amazon

Terry Tarnoff

If you were free, completely free with no ties or commitments: you could go anywhere, do anything - what would you choose? 
 
In 1971, Terry Tarnoff, fed up with a government he couldn't trust and wanting no part of a war he didn't believe in, packed a bag, picked up his guitar and sixteen harmonicas and headed out into the world. What followed was the ultimate drop-out adventure. 
 
For eight years Terry travelled the world. He saw it all: the blues clubs of Amsterdam and the jungles of Africa, he smoked chillums with the lepers of India, trance-danced at a death ceremony in Tibet, developed a heroin habit in Bangkok, nearly died driving through the poppy fields of Thailand with a kamikaze cab driver and found the girl of his dreams in wintry Stockholm. 
 
THE BONE MAN OF BENARES is about true love and spiritual-awakening. It's about turning on, tuning in and dropping out. In a world full of larger than life characters, and where the only limitation is your own imagination, Terry Tarnoff went in search of answers - and, amazingly, found some. Along the way he had the craziest road trip you'll ever encounter.

The Bone Man Of Benares

Ann Vanderhoof

Who hasn't fantasized about leaving their job, saying goodbye to the rat race and escaping to some exotic destination in search of sun, sand, and a different way of life? Ann Vanderhoof and her husband did just that. 
 
In the mid 1990s, the author and her husband were driven, forty-something professionals who were desperate for a break from their harried, deadline-dominated lives. So they left their jobs, rented out their house, moved onto a 42-foot yacht called Receta ('recipe' in Spanish) and set sail from their home in Canada for the Caribbean. AN EMBARRASSMENT OF MANGOES is Ann Vanderhoof's intimate account of this two-year midlife interlude during which she and her husband travelled more than 7,000 nautical miles, dropped anchor in 16 countries (and 47 individual islands), and adapted to a new life on 'island time'. 
 
Exchanging suits for bare feet, they leave the stresses of their old life behind and become caught up in a world that is simultaneously simpler and more exuberant. They sip rum with their neighbours and dance through the streets during Carnival, explore secluded beaches, learn to pull their dinner from the sea and create delectable dishes in their tiny galley kitchen. 
 
Interspersed with irresistible recipes, from cracked conch in the Bahamas, curried lobster in Grenada, spicy island gingerbread to West Indian rum punch, AN EMBARRASSMENT OF MANGOES is the enticing story of discovering not just vibrant new cultures and cuisines, but what really matters.

An Embarrassment Of Mangoes

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 this, on his return to his adopted homeland he embarked on an adventure worthy of the mythical Arabian Nights, going in search of the stories and storytellers that have nourished this most alluring of countries for centuries. Wandering through the medinas of Fez and Marrakech, criss-crossing the Saharan sands and tasting the hospitality of ordinary Moroccans, he collected a treasury of traditional stories recounted by a vivid and eccentric cast of characters: from master masons who work only at night to Sufi wise men who write for soap operas and Tuareg guides addicted to reality TV. Himself a link in the chain of scholars and teachers who have passed such tales down from father to son, mother to daughter, Shah reveals a world and a way of thinking that most visitors to Morocco barely know exist.

In Arabian Nights

After working for four years at a leading London book publisher, Polly Evans moved to Hong Kong where she spent many happy hours as a senior editor on the city's biggest entertainment weekly. But fighting deadlines from a twizzly office chair and free use of the coffee machine seemed just too easy. So Polly exchanged the shiny red cabs of Hong Kong for a more demanding form of transport - a bicycle - and set off on a voyage of discovery around Spain. 
 
From the thigh-burning ascents of the Pyrenees to the relentless olive groves of Andalusia, Polly found more adventures that she had bargained for. She survived a nail-biting encounter with a sprightly pig, escaped over-zealous suitors, had her morality questioned by the locals, encountered some dubious aficionados on the road and indulged her love of regional cooking. While she pedalled, Polly pondered some of the more lurid details of Spanish history - the king who collected pickled heads, the queen who toured the country with her husband's mouldering corpse, and the unfortunate duchess who lost her feet. And wherever she cycled, she ate and ate - and yet still she shrank out of her trousers.

It's Not About The Tapas

In the dead of winter, Polly Evans ventures to the remote Yukon Territory in Canada's far northwest, where temperatures plunge to minus forty and the sun rises for just a few hours each day. Her mission: to learn to drive sled dogs. But when she arrives, she finds there's more to this unspoilt wilderness than deathly cold. 
 
In a pristine landscape patrolled by wolves and caribou, Polly takes her first bruising lessons in the art of mushing. But before the snows melt in spring, she hones her skills and becomes infatuated with this brutal, beautiful land where jagged gems of hoar frost glisten on the spruce boughs and the northern lights weave green and red across the skies. Above all, she discovers a deep affection for the loving, mischievous huskies who with such courage and enthusiasm escort her through the lone white trails of the unforgiving north.

Mad Dogs And An Englishwoman

Eleni Gage

Eleni Gage, a young journalist living in New York, leaves her Manhattan flat to return to the remote but beautiful Greek village of Lia in northern Greece and rebuild her ruined ancestral home. But this is not just another tale of quaint rustic DIY - the house was the scene of imprisonment and torture, and its ruins are stalked by the ghosts of the Greek Civil War. 
The story is played out in the stunning mountainous landscape of Epiros, one of the least-visited regions of Europe. As Eleni becomes part of the village, her neighbours and the house come vividly to life while her own disasters, triumphs and self-discoveries are alternately poignant and hilarious. The cast of characters includes Eleni's formidable yet miniscule aunts - the thitsas, who fear that she will be eaten by wolves; her immigrant Albanian builders; and the residents of modern-day Lia, whose feelings about the rebuilding of a house where such terrible events took place are ambivalent at best. 
 
Informed by her knowledge of Greece's folklore, literature, language and history, Eleni's story is unfailingly witty and wise. But beneath it all lie the indelible stains of a real-life Greek tragedy.

North Of Ithaka

When Polly Evans read a survey claiming that the last bastion of masculinity, the real Kiwi bloke, was about to breathe his last, she was seized by a sense of foreboding. Abandoning the London winter she took off on a motorbike for the windswept beaches and golden plains of New Zealand, hoping to root out some examples of this endangered species for posterity. But her challenges didn't stop at the men. 
 
Just weeks after passing her test, Polly rode from Auckland's glitzy Viaduct Basin to the vineyards of Hawkes Bay and on to the Southern Alps. She found wild kiwis in the dead of night, kayaked among dolphins at dawn, and spent an evening on a remote hillside with a sheep-shearing gang. As she travelled, Polly reflected on the Maori warriors who carved their enemies' bones into cutlery, the pioneer family who lived in a tree, and the flamboyant gold miners who lit their pipes with five-pound notes, and wondered how their descendents have become pathologically obsessed with helpfulness and Coronation Street. 
 
The author of the highly acclaimed It's Not About the Tapas reaches some unexpected conclusions about the new New Zealand man - and finds that evolution has taken some unlikely twists.

Kiwis Might Fly

Around New Zealand On Two Big Wheels

John Man

**A SOURCE FOR MARCO POLO, A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES** 
 
 
Marco Polo's journey from Venice, through Europe and most of Asia, to the court of Kublai Khan in China is one of the most audacious in history. His account of his experiences, known simply as The Travels, uncovered an entirely new world of emperors and concubines, great buildings - 'stately pleasure domes' in Coleridge's dreaming - huge armies and imperial riches. His book shaped the West's understanding of China for hundreds of years. 
 
John Man travelled in Marco's footsteps to Xanadu, in search of the truth behind Marco's stories; to separate legend from fact. Drawing on his own journey, archaeology and archival study, John Man paints a vivid picture of the man behind the myth and the true story of the great court of Kublai Khan.

Xanadu

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