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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Joseph Brodsky

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'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street Journal 
 
Watermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many winters, as he remembers friends, lovers and enemies he has encountered. Above all, he reflects with great poetic force on how the rising tide of time affects city and inhabitants alike. 
 
Watermark is an unforgettable piece of writing, and a wonderful evocation of a remarkable, unique city. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Watermark: An Essay on Venice

Gerald Durrell

‘Another tiger-golden day lay ahead of us. It was as though England had never really existed’ 
 
The Durrell clan’s escapades on their Greek island home resume with the second volume of the Corfu Trilogy. Budding zoologist Gerald continues to explore the natural wonders around him, enjoying a night fishing trip, receiving a donkey as a birthday present and accidentally bringing a bear home for tea. Here too are more stories of the eccentric creatures he calls his family, including Margo’s ill-advised foray into spiritualism and what becomes known as ‘Mother’s Great Romance’. Ending as the Second World War is declared, Birds, Beasts and Relatives is an enchanting return to a magical place.

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

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‘Living in Corfu was rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas’ 
 
It is 1935 and the Durrells have escaped the leaden summer skies of Bournemouth to arrive ‘like a troupe of medieval tumblers’ on the sun-drenched island of Corfu for a new life. Gerald Durrell’s beloved portrayal of his chaotic family – beatific Mother, Roger the dog, diet-obsessed Margo, book-loving Lawrence and gun-wielding Leslie – as well as his own adventures with a burgeoning menagerie of beasts, birds and insects (including an owl called Ulysses), is a timeless account of an idyllic childhood and an uproarious portrait of the English abroad.

My Family and Other Animals

Boswell James

Samuel Johnson

Book by Samuel Johnson, published in 1775. The Journey was the result of a three-month trip to Scotland that Johnson took with James Boswell in 1773. It contains Johnson's descriptions of the customs, religion, education, trade, and agriculture of a society that was new to him. The account in Boswell's diary, published after Johnson's death as The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), offers an intimate personal record of Johnson's behavior and conversation during the trip.

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Wilfred Thesiger

During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Travelling from village to village by canoe, he won acceptance by dispensing medicines and treating the sick. In this account of his time there he pays tribute to the hospitality, loyalty, courage and endurance of the people, describes their impressive reed houses, the waterways and lakes teeming with wildlife, the herding of buffalo and hunting of wild boar, moments of tragedy and moments of pure comedy, all in vivid, engaging detail. 
Untouched by the modern world until recently, these independent people, their way of life and their surroundings have suffered widespread destruction under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Wilfred Thesiger's magnificent account of his time spent among them is a moving testament to their now threatened culture and the landscape they inhabit.

The Marsh Arabs

‘My collection of animals swelled to a point where even Mother occasionally grew alarmed’ 
 
The island of Corfu, where the Durrell family live in agreeable chaos, is paradise for aspiring naturalist Gerald. His battalion of creatures has grown to include eleven puppies, a toad named Dierdre and an unwelcome infestation of scorpions. Yet the human visitors to their sun-drenched villa are even more curious, whether it is an innocent pair of American painters ripe for practical jokes, or a supercilious Count who barely survives an outing on Gerald’s home-made boat, the Bootle-bumtrinket. The third volume in the Corfu Trilogy brings this glorious tale of halcyon days to a close.

The Garden of the Gods

Mary Kingsley

Until 1893, Mary Kingsley lived the typical life of a single Victorian woman, tending to sick relatives and keeping house for her brother. However, on the death of her parents, she made an extraordinary decision: with no prior knowledge of the region, she set out on a solo trip to West Africa. Her subsequent book, published in 1897, describes dangerous treks and deadly animals with enormous humour and verve, and has stood the test of time as a classic travel narrative by a woman whose sense of adventure and fascination with Africa transformed her whole life.

Travels in West Africa

Mário de Andrade

'My life's done a somersault,' wrote acclaimed modernist writer Mário de Andrade. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, he finally embarked on a three-month odyssey up the great river and into the wild heart of his native Brazil with a group of avant-garde luminaries. All abandoned ship but a socialite, her two nieces, and, of course, the author himself. And so begins the humorous account of Andrade's steamboat adventure into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. 
 
Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, his sarcastic, down-to-earth diary entries not only offer comedic and awe-inspiring details of life and the landscape but also trace his internal metamorphosis: his travels challenge what he thought he knew about the Amazon, and drastically alter his understanding of his motherland.

The Apprentice Tourist

Laurie Lee

'They are memorials to times and countries whose best is probably past and gone . . . I was lucky to have known them when I did, before darkness began to fall from the air.' 
 
When Laurie Lee first left his country village aged nineteen, he discovered a delight in the outside world that remained undiminished throughout his writing life. This enchanting collection of his 'first loves and obsessions' brings together pieces including recollections of his Gloucestershire childhood celebrated in Cider With Rosie; reflections on life, love and death, such as a moving report from the tragic Welsh village of Aberfan; and evocative travel writings on Tuscany, Mexico and the West Indies, amongst others, before they were transformed by mass tourism. Together they capture a world that is lost forever. 
 
'One of Britain's finest writers' Daily Mail 
 
'There's a formidable, instant charm in the writing that genuinely makes it difficult to put the book down' New Statesman

I Can't Stay Long

D. H. Lawrence

Jill Franks

Mara Kalnins

Written after the First World War when he was living in Sicily, SEA AND SARDINIA records Lawrence's journey to Sardinia and back in January 1921. It reveals his delighted response to a new landscape and people and his uncanny ability to transmute the spirit of place into literary art. Like his other travel writings the book is also a shrewd inquiry into the political and social values of an era which saw the rise of communism and fascism.

Sea and Sardinia

J.M. Synge

In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands, published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas. 
 
Yet this book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, &quot;If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the power of two.&quot; Towards the end of the last century Irish nationalists came to identify the area as the country's uncorrupted heart, the repository of its ancient language, culture and spiritual values. It was for these reasons that Yeats suggested Synge visit the islands to record their way of life. The result is a passionate exploration of a triangle of contradictory relationships &ndash; between an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism, a physical environment of ascetic loveliness and savagely unpredictable moods, and Synge himself, formed by modern European thought but in love with the primitive.

The Aran Islands

George Orwell

George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society. 
 
'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.' 
 
Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.

Down and Out in Paris and London

Penguin Modern Classics

'The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world' 
 
Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin. But, deciding to travel further a field and knowing only the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he heads for Spain. With just a blanket to sleep under and his trusty violin, he spends a year crossing Spain, from Vigo in the north to the southern coast. Only the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War puts an end to his extraordinary peregrinations . . .

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Henry Miller

'New York is an aquarium ... where there are nothing but hellbenders and lungfish and slimy, snag-toothed groupers and sharks' 
 
In 1935 Henry Miller set off from his adopted home, Paris, to revisit his native land, America. Aller Retour New York, his exuberant, humorous missive to his friend Alfred Perlès describing the trip and his return journey on a Dutch steamer, is filled with vivid reflections on his hellraising antics, showing Miller at the height of his powers. This edition also includes Via Dieppe-Newhaven, his entertaining account of a failed attempt to visit England. 
 
'The greatest American writer' Bob Dylan

Aller Retour New York

Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh chose the name &quot;Labels&quot; for his first travel book because, he said, the places he visited were already &quot;fully labelled&quot; in people's minds. Yet even the most seasoned traveller could not fail to be inspired by his quintessentially English attitude and by his eloquent and frequently outrageous wit. From Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, from Egyptian porters and Italian priests to Maltese sailors and Moroccan merchants - as he cruises around the Mediterranean his pen cuts through the local colour to give an entertaining portrait of the Englishman abroad.

Labels

A Mediterranean Journal

Robert Louis Stevenson

In 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson was suffering from poor health, struggling to survive on the income derived from his writings, and tormented by his infatuation with Fanny Osbourne, a married American woman.  His response was to embark on a journey through the Cevennes with a donkey, Modestine, and a notebook, which he later transformed into Travels with a Donkey.  Just a few months after publication, Stevenson was off again - this time crossing the Atlantic and the breadth of America in the hope of being re-united with Fanny, an experience he recorded in The Amateur Emigrant.  Both pieces are classics of travel writings, which reveal as much about Stevenson's character as the landscape he travels through.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and the Amateur Emigrant

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

'The play of moonlight on the icebergs was indescribably strange, and its magnificent refracted shimmers were brighter than day. One night, fooled by its brilliance, I got up at three in the morning.' 
 
Scorching heat, rich, fertile soil and treacherous snakes marked the landscape in which Kpomassie grew up in 1950s Togo, West Africa. When, as a teenager, he discovered a book on Greenland, this distant land of snow and ice became an instant obsession and he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. 
 
In this work of rich, immersive travel writing Kpomassie invites the reader to join him on his audacious journey as he makes his way from the Equator to the bitter cold of the Arctic and settles into life with the Inuit peoples, adapting to their foods and customs. Part memoir, part anthropological observation, this warm, captivating narrative teems with nuanced observations on community, belonging and colonization. 
 
Originally published in 1981, this critically acclaimed work has been translated into nine languages and is a rare example of travel writing from a West African perspective that highlights unexpected connection between cultures despite their contrasting landscapes. 
 
This translation by James Kirkup has previously been published with the title An African in Greenland

Michel the Giant

An African in Greenland

Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Eton and Oxford. Though British, he was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life, &quot;the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets, etc.&quot; In the spirit of T.E. Lawrence, Thesiger spent five years exploring and wandering the deserts of Arabia. With vivid descriptions and colorful anecdotes he narrates his stories, including two crossings of the Empty Quarter, among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels.

Arabian Sands

Ernesto Che Guevara

'All we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight northward' 
 
'In late 1951, Guevara and Alberto Granado set off on the 500cc Norton they nicknamed La Poderosa ('The Powerful One') with no other agenda than a lust for life and a desire to see it all. The Motorcycle Diaries offer a unique perspective on what led this would-be doctor from relatively affluent Argentina to become one of the 20th century's most important political figures ... genuinely exhilarating' Guardian 
 
'For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Guevara has emerged to predict his own legendary future' Time

The Motorcycle Diaries

Charles Dickens

'Like Shakespeare, Dickens was able to embrace a whole world' John Mortimer 
 
When 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 descriptions cover everything from his comically wretched sea voyage to his sheer astonishment at Niagara Falls, while he also visited hospitals, prisons and law courts. But Dickens's depiction of America as a land ruled by money, built on slavery, with a corrupt press and unsavoury manners, provoked a hostile reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. American Notes is an illuminating account of a great writer's revelatory encounter with the New World. 
 
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Patricia Ingham

American Notes

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 attend Emperor Haile Selassie's coronation in 1930; his travels in Aden, Zanzibar, Kenya and the Congo, coping with unbearable heat and plagued by mosquitoes; a journey to Guyana and Brazil; and his return to Addis Ababa in 1935 to report on the war between Abyssinia and Italy. Waugh's adventures on his travels gave him the ideas for such classic novels as Scoop and Black Mischief.

When the Going Was Good

Mary Wollstonecraft

William Godwin

In these two closely linked works - a travel book and a biography of its author - we witness a moving encounter between two of the most daring and original minds of the late eighteenth century: A Short Residence in Sweden is the record of Wollstonecraft's last journey in search of happiness, into the remote and beautiful backwoods of Scandinavia. The quest for a lost treasure ship, the pain of a wrecked love affair, memories of the French Revolution, and the longing for some Golden Age, all shape this vivid narrative, which Richard Holmes argues is one of the neglected masterpieces of early English Romanticism. 
 
Memoirs is Godwin's own account of Wollstonecraft's life, written with passionate intensity a few weeks after her tragic death. Casting aside literary convention, Godwin creates an intimate portrait of his wife, startling in its candour and psychological truth. Received with outrage by friends and critics alike, and virtually suppressed for a century, it can now be recognized as one of the landmarks in the development of modern biography.

A Short Residence in Sweden & Memoirs of the Author of 'The Rights of Woman'

Alexander Humboldt

One of the greatest nineteenth-century scientist-explorers, Alexander von Humboldt traversed the tropical Spanish Americas between 1799 and 1804. By the time of his death in 1859, he had won international fame for his scientific discoveries, his observations of Native American peoples and his detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the 'new continent'. The first to draw and speculate on Aztec art, to observe reverse polarity in magnetism and to discover why America is called America, his writings profoundly influenced the course of Victorian culture, causing Darwin to reflect: 'He alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the Tropics'.

Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent

Alfred Russel Wallace

'I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head' 
 
Of all the extraordinary Victorian travelogues, The Malay Archipelago has a fair claim to be the greatest - both as a beautiful, alarming, vivid and gripping account of some eight years' travel across the entire Malay world - from Singapore to the western edges of New Guinea - and as the record of a great mind. As Wallace, often under conditions of terrible hardship and sickness, battles through jungles, lives with headhunters, and collects beetles, butterflies and birds-of-paradise, he makes discoveries about the workings of biology that have shaped our view of the world ever since.

The Malay Archipelago

Saul Bellow

In the mid-1970s, Saul Bellow visited Israel and To Jerusalem and Back is his account of his time there. Immersing himself in its landscape and culture, he records the opinions, passions and dreams of Israelis of varying viewpoints &ndash; from Prime Minister Rabin, novelist Amos Oz and the editor of an Arab-language newspaper to a kibbutznik escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and the barber at Bellow&rsquo;s hotel. Through meditations steeped in history and literature he adds his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. Bellow&rsquo;s exploration of a beautiful and troubled city is a powerful testament to the unique spirit and challenges of Israel, its history and its future.

To Jerusalem and Back

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