Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Edmund de Waal

The gripping story of the lure of porcelain, or 'white gold', from the Number One bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes. 
 
** A Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller ** 
 
 "Other things in the world are white but for me porcelain comes first" 
 
 A handful of clay from a Chinese hillside carries a promise: that mixed with the right materials, it might survive the fire of the kiln, and fuse into porcelain - translucent, luminous, white. 
 
 Acclaimed writer and potter Edmund de Waal sets out on a quest - a journey that begins in the dusty city of Jingdezhen in China and travels on to Venice, Versailles, Dublin, Dresden, the Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina and the hills of Cornwall to tell the history of porcelain. Along the way, he meets the witnesses to its creation; those who were inspired, made rich or heartsick by it, and the many whose livelihoods, minds and bodies were broken by this obsession. It spans a thousand years and reaches into some of the most tragic moments of recent times. 
 
 In these intimate and compelling encounters with the people and landscapes who made porcelain, Edmund de Waal enriches his understanding of this rare material, the 'white gold' he has worked with for decades. 
 
'This is a haunting book, a book that amasses itself piece by piece, gaining in weight.' Olivia Laing, New Statesman 
 
'A mighty achievement' Guardian

The White Road

A Journey Into Obsession

a pilgrimage of sorts

Damian Le Bas

'I needed to get to the stopping places, so I needed to get on the road. It was the road where I might at last find out where I belonged.' 
 
Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language; the places they worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lores of their people. 
 
In a bid to better understand his heritage, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the stopping places – the old encampment sites known only to Travellers. Through winter frosts and summer dawns, from horse fairs to Gypsy churches, Damian lives on the road, somewhere between the romanticised Gypsies of old, and their much-maligned descendants of today. 
 
‘A beautiful writer who seems born to tell this fascinating story’ Amy Liptrot 
 
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award 
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award 
Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize

The Stopping Places

A Journey Through Gypsy Britain

Lawrence Osborne

Tourists come to Bangkok for many reasons: a night of love, a stay in a luxury hotel, or simply to disappear for a while. Lawrence Osborne comes for the cheap dentistry, and then stays when he finds he can live off just a few dollars a day. 
 
Osborne's Bangkok is a vibrant, instinctual city full of contradictions. He wanders the streets, dining on insects, trawling through forgotten neighbourhoods, decayed temples and sleazy bars. 
 
Far more than a travel book, Bangkok Days explores both the little-known, extraordinary city and the lives of a handful of doomed ex-patriates living there, 'as vivid a set of liars and losers as was ever invented by Graham Greene' (New York Times).

Bangkok Days

Jonathan Meiburg

An enthralling voyage of discovery to meet a rare and mysterious bird of prey that puzzled Darwin, fascinates modern-day falconers, and carries secrets of our planet's deep past in its family history. 
 
In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by a 'mischievous' animal he met in the Falklands: rare, crow-like falcons known today as striated caracaras. These clever, fearless birds of prey stole hats and valuables from the crew of the Beagle, and they seemed unusually interested in humans. Darwin couldn't understand why they were confined to a set of remote islands; but he set this mystery aside, and never returned to it. 
 
Almost two centuries later, Jonathan Meiburg takes up the chase. He travels through South America in search of striated caracaras and their close relatives, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of the Guiana Shield, and reveals the wild and surprising story of their origins, their keen and flexible minds, and their possible futures. 
 
'Fascinating' Margaret Atwood, West End Phoenix 
 
'Hugely entertaining and enlightening' Jennifer Ackerman, author of The Genius of Birds

A Most Remarkable Creature

The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Bird of Prey

The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Bird of Prey

Julia Blackburn

Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Biography Award and the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 
 
Julia Blackburn and her husband moved to a little house in the mountains of northern Italy in 1999. She arrived as a stranger but a series of events brought her close to the old people of the village and they began to tell her their stories. Of how their village had been trapped in an archaic feudal system and owned by a local padrone who demanded his share of all they had, of the eruption of the Second World War, of the conflict between the fascists and the partisans, of death and fear and hunger of how they hid like like foxes in the mountains. 'Write it down for us,' they said, 'because otherwise it will all be lost.' 
 
Thin Paths is a celebration of the songlines of one place that could be many places and a celebration of the humour and determination of the human spirit.

Thin Paths

Journeys in and around an Italian Mountain Village

Sara Wheeler

Shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book Award 
 
After reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as Terra Incognita and The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler rediscovered America thirty-five years after her first Greyhound trip across the country. She returns in turbulent midlife to trace the steps of six women who fled various sorts of trouble in nineteenth-century England and went to the United States to reinvent themselves. 
 
Her travel companions include Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and author of the biting Domestic Manners of the Americans; the actress Fanny Kemble, who shocked the nation with her passionate first-hand indictment of slavery; the prolifically pamphleteering economist Harriet Martineau; the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, who had never been more than twelve miles from her Yorkshire village before she sailed to the New World; the traveller Isabella Bird, whose many ailments remained in check as long as she was scaling the Rockies; and the novelist Catherine Hubback, niece of Jane Austen, who deposited her husband in a madhouse and rode the brand-new rails to San Francisco. 
 
Tough-minded outsiders, these women’s truest qualities emerged in a country as incomplete and tentative as their native land was staid and settled. And they discovered second acts for themselves at a time when the world expected them to disappear politely. From the swampy heat of Georgia’s Sea Islands to the icy purity of the Cascades, Sara Wheeler finds their path, and her own.

O My America!

Second Acts in a New World

Nicholas Shakespeare

In this fascinating history of two turbulent centuries in an apparently idyllic place, Shakespeare effortlessly weaves the history of this unique island with a kaleidoscope of stories featuring a cast of unlikely characters from Errol Flynn to the King of Iceland, a village full of Chatwins and, inevitably, a family of Shakespeares. But what makes this more than a personal quest is Shakespeare's discovery that, despite the nineteen century purges, the Tasmanian Aborigines were not, as previously believed, entirely wiped out.

In Tasmania

Adventures at the End of the World

Jill Ker Conway

The Road From Coorain is the beautifully written narrative of Jill Ker Conway's journey from girlhood on an isolated sheep-farm in the grasslands of Australia to her departure for America (and eventually the presidency of Smith College).

The Road From Coorain

Jacqueline Yallop

Twenty years ago, Jacqueline Yallop was leading guided walks at Nenthead, one of a network of ‘model’ villages which sprang up across Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A life-long fascination was born. 
 
From Scotland’s New Lanark Mills to the Arts and Crafts cottages of Port Sunlight, Yallop visits these utopian experiments to explore their rich histories. Looking at everything from sewage systems to sculpture, chocolate to coal, and free trade to electoral emancipation, this book is a personal exploration of why and how these village utopias came about, what they tell us about the past, and how they still resonate with us today.

Dreamstreets

A Journey Through Britain’s Village Utopias

Jeremy Seal

The course of the Meander is so famously indirect that the river's name has come to signify digression - an invitation Jeremy Seal is duty-bound to accept while travelling the length of it in a one-man canoe. At every twist and turn of his journey, from the Meander's source in the uplands of Central Turkey to its mouth on the Aegean Sea, Seal illuminates his account with a wealth of cultural, historical and personal asides. 
 
It is a journey that takes him from Turkey's steppe interior - the stamping ground of such illustrious adventurers as Xerxes, Alexander the Great and the Crusader Kings - to the great port city of Miletus, home of the earliest Western philosophers. Along the way Seal unpicks the history of this remarkable region, but he also encounters a rich assortment of contemporary characters who reveal a rural Turkey on the cusp of change. Above all, this is the story of a river that first brought the cultures of East and West into contact - and conflict - with one another, its banks littered with the spoil of empires, the marks of war, and the detritus of recent industrialisation. 
 
At once epic, intimate and insightful, Meander is a brilliant evocation of a land between two worlds.

Meander

East to West along a Turkish River

Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959) was one of the youngest members of Captain Scott's final expedition to the Antarctic. Cherry undertook an epic journey in the Antarctic winter to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin. The temperature fell to seventy below, it was dark all the time, his teeth shattered in the cold and the tent blew away. 'But we kept our tempers,' Cherry wrote, 'even with God.' 
 
After serving in the First War Cherry was invalided home, and with the zealous encouragement of his neighbour Bernard Shaw he wrote a masterpiece. In The Worst Journey in the World Cherry transformed tragedy and grief into something fine. But as the years unravelled he faced a terrible struggle against depression, breakdown and despair, haunted by the possibility that he could have saved Scott and his companions. 
 
This is the first biography of Cherry. Sara Wheeler, who has travelled extensively in the Antarctic, has had unrestricted access to new material and the full co-operation of Cherry's family.

Cherry

A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Michael Booth

‘His account of their “foodie family road trip” establishes Booth as the next Bill Bryson.’ New York Times 
 
Japan 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 dishes such as cod sperm and octopus ice cream, is only now beginning to be fully appreciated in the sushi-saturated West, as are the remarkable health benefits of the traditional Japanese diet. 
 
Food and travel writer Michael Booth sets of to take the culinary pulse of contemporary Japan and he and his young family travel the length of the country - from bear-infested, beer-loving Hokkaido to snake-infested, seaweed-loving Okinawa. 
 
What do the Japanese know about food? Perhaps more than anyone else on earth, judging by this fascinating and funny journey through an extraordinary food-obsessed country. 
 
Winner of the Guild of Food Writers Kate Whiteman Award for the best book on food and travel.

Sushi and Beyond

What the Japanese Know About Cooking

Peter Moore

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. An inventive biography of one of the most famous ships of all time – an alluring combination of history, adventure and science. 
 
‘HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR’ Christopher Hart, Sunday Times 
 
From Johnson’s Dictionary to campaigns for liberty, the Enlightenment was an age of endeavours. ‘Endeavour’ was also the name given to a commonplace, coal-carrying vessel bought by the Royal Navy in 1768 for an expedition to the South Seas. No one could have guessed that Endeavour would go on to become the most significant ship in the history of British exploration. 
 
Endeavour famously carried Captain James Cook on his first great voyage, but her complete story has never been told before. Here, Peter Moore sets out to explore the different lives of this remarkable ship – from the acorn that grew into the oak that made her, to her rich and complex legacy. 
 
‘Fascinating and richly detailed... Peter Moore has brought us an acute insight into the ship that carried some of the most successful explorers across the world. A fine book that’s definitely worth exploring’ MICHAEL PALIN

Endeavour

The Sunday Times bestselling biography of Captain Cook’s recently discovered ship

The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World

Patrick Marnham

The terrifying first use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was the most controversial act of warfare in history, dramatically ending the Second World War but ushering in the age of mass destruction. Yet it was also the climax of a story that extends beyond Japan and Washington: the culmination of decades of scientific achievement and centuries of colonial exploitation. 
 
Snake Dance is the account of a journey that turned into a quest to discover how humanity reaches this point. Patrick Marnham travels from the opulent nineteenth-century palaces of King Leopold II of Belgium, built with riches plundered from the Congo, to the lethally derelict nuclear reactor of modern-day Kinshasa. He follows the shipment of Congolese uranium to the deserts of New Mexico for the Manhattan Project’s secret test detonation. Here he uncovers the legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two ‘mad geniuses’ who confronted the devastating power of twentieth-century science in very different ways. 
 
Both men travelled to New Mexico. Oppenheimer was honoured for buiding a bomb, the ancestor of weapons that have enslaved humanity. Warburg, condemned to obscurity and confined to a mental hospital, regained his sanity by studying the rituals of the Native Americans of the Southwest who, for thousands of years, practiced the ritual of the 'snake dance' in an attempt to harness the power of lightening. And it was in New Mexico, at Los Alamos, that the ultimate act of playing God was realised. 
 
The circle is closed in Japan.. Faced with the catastrophe at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant in March 2011, scientific man, like the snake dancers, is faced with a power beyond his control. Spanning three continents and the history of civilisation, Snake Dance is at once an intrepid intellectual adventure and a wake-up call for mankind.

Snake Dance

Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky

Kathleen Winter

In 2010, bestselling author Kathleen Winter took a journey across the legendary Northwest Passage. From Greenland to Baffin Island and all along this arctic passage, Winter witnesses the new mathematics of the melting North – where polar bears mate with grizzlies, creating a new hybrid species; where the earth is on the cusp of yielding so much buried treasure that five nations stand poised to claim sovereignty of the land; and where the local Inuit population struggles to navigate the tension between taking their part in the new global economy and defending their traditional way of life. In breathtaking prose charged with vivid descriptions of the land and its people, Kathleen Winter’s Boundless is a haunting and powerful story: a homage to the ever-evolving and magnetic power of the North.

Boundless

Adventures in the Northwest Passage

Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage

Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat had long been scared off from Carnival by a loved one, who spun tales of people dislocating hips from gyrating with too much abandon, losing their voices from singing too loudly, going deaf from the clamor of immense speakers, and being punched, stabbed, pummeled, or fondled by other lustful revelers. Now an adult, she resolves to return and exorcise her Carnival demons. 
 
During her journeys she traces the heroic and tragic history of the island, from French colonists and Haitian revolutionaries to American invaders and home-grown dictators. Danticat also introduces us to many of the performers, artists, and organizers who re-create the myths and legends that bring the Carnival festivities to life. When Carnival arrives, we watch as she goes from observer to participant and finally loses herself in the overwhelming embrace of the crowd. 
 
Part travelogue, part memoir, this is a lyrical narrative of a writer rediscovering her country along with a part of herself.

After The Dance

A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti

Kapka Kassabova

Set in the valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river valleys in Europe and a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Elixir is an unforgettable exploration of the deep connections between people, plants and place 
 
'Uplifting and beautifully written' SPECTATOR 
'Dark and mysterious and beautiful' FINANCIAL TIMES 
'Exceptional' BBC WILDLIFE 
 
Over several seasons, Kassabova spends time with the people of this magical region. She meets women and men who work in a long lineage of foragers, healers and mystics. She learns about wild plants and the ancient practice of herbalism, and experiences a symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters we come to feel the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered. Yet, in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for hope. The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform collective suffering into healing. 
 
Immersive and enthralling, at its heart Elixir is a search for a cure to what ails us in the Anthropocene. It is an urgent call to rethink how we live - in relation to one another, to the Earth and to the cosmos.

Elixir

A Voyage into Alchemy

In the Valley at the End of Time

A modern classic on exploring and understanding the Antarctic, the most uncharted place on our planet. 
 
 Terra Incognita is a meditation on the landscape, myths and history of one of the remotest parts of the globe, as well as an encounter with the international temporary residents of the region - living in close confinement despite the surrounding acres of white space - and the mechanics of day-to-day life in extraordinary conditions. Through Sara Wheeler, the Antarctic is revealed, in all its seductive mystery. 
 
'Antarctica could hope for no better chronicler: spirited, humorous and highly intelligent, she is also a writer of rare talent' Observer

Terra Incognita

Travels in Antarctica

Bodil Malmsten

'In the same way as there's a partner for every person, there's a place. All you have to do is find the one that's yours among the billions that belong to someone else, you have to be awake, you have to choose.' 
 
With this conviction in mind, acclaimed Swedish writer Bodil Malmsten abandons her native country at the age of fifty-five and settles in Brittany. 
 
At the heart of this memoir is the conviction that the happiness to be found in Finistère will not allow itself to be, cannot be, expressed in writing. Embroidered around this seeming paradox are poignant, outraged and thought-provoking observations on the widest range of subjects: how not to buy plants, the elicit pleasures of bargain-hunting, the misery of writer's block, social democracy, racism, tulipomania, the stubbornness of bank managers, the controlling of moles and slugs, death, political hypocrisy, the delights of wild weather. Malmsten's passion and humour shine through every episode she describes, however minor, offering the reader a window onto a solitary life at once touching, thought-provoking and, occasionally, hilarious.

The Price of Water in Finistère

Andrzej Stasiuk

Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveller. His journeys - by car, train, bus, ferry - take him from his native Poland to small towns and villages with unfamiliar yet evocative names in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine. Here is an unfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the Communist era and the arrival of capitalism and globalisation. 
 
'Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin,' he wonders, as he is being driven at breakneck speed in a hundred-year-old Audi - loose wires hanging from the dashboard - by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. And so his journey continues all the way to Babadag, near the shore of the Black Sea, where he sees his first minaret.

On the Road to Babadag

Travels in the Other Europe

Rory Stewart

THE NO. 1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF POLITICS ON THE EDGE 
 
Rory Stewart and his father are undertaking their final walk together along the Marches – the frontier that divides Scotland and England. 
 
‘Travel writing at its best’ OBSERVER 
‘Profoundly moving’ SPECTATOR 
 
On their six-hundred-mile, thirty-day journey, the pair relive Scottish dances, reflect on Burmese honey-bears, and on the loss of human presence in the British landscape. Their odyssey develops into a history of nationhood, an anatomy of the landscape, a chronicle of contemporary Britain and an exuberant encounter between a father and a son. 
 
‘A bewitching book’ SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘An unforgettable tale’ NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC 
 
‘Deeply moving, honest and loving’ COUNTRY LIFE 
 
GUARDIAN READERS’ BOOK OF THE YEAR 
OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 
WINNER OF THE HUNTER DAVIES LAKELAND PRIZE 
 
Please note: The book cover received may differ from the cover displayed here.

The Marches

Border walks with my father

Tim Parks

How does an Italian become Italian? 
Or an Englishman English, for that matter? 
Are foreigners born, or made? 
 
In An Italian Education Tim Parks focuses on his own young children in the small village near Verona where he lives, building a fascinating picture of the contemporary Italian family at school, at home, at work and at play. 
 
The result is a delight: at once a family book and a travel book, not quite enamoured with either children or Italy, but always affectionate, always amused and always amusing.

An Italian Education

‘A classic for our times’ MONIQUE ROFFEY 
 
‘Haunting, beautiful… Anima will live with me for a long time’ CAL FLYN 
 
'A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIAN 
 
Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe. 
 
She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community. 
 
Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human–animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living – one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world. 
 
‘An extraordinary work of exploration, both inner and outer. It should be required reading for everyone thinking about our human environment: which is to say, all of us’ THE TABLET

Anima

A Wild Pastoral

Lauren Elkin

*Shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay* 
 
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 by the Financial Times, Guardian, New Statesman, Observer, The Millions and Emerald Street 
 
'Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. 
 
That is an imaginary definition.' 
 
If the word flâneur conjures up visions of Baudelaire, boulevards and bohemia – then what exactly is a flâneuse? 
 
In this gloriously provocative and celebratory book, Lauren Elkin defines her as ‘a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and moves us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo and London, exploring along the way the paths taken by the flâneuses who have lived and walked in those cities. 
 
From nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to film-maker Agnes Varda, Flâneuse considers what is at stake when a certain kind of light-footed woman encounters the city and changes her life, one step at a time.

Flaneuse

Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

Sarah Bakewell

This gripping nineteenth-century adventure stars Jorgen Jorgenson, who ran away to sea at fourteen and began a brilliant career by sailing to establish the first colony in Tasmania. Twists of fortune then found him captaining a warship for Napoleon before joining a British trading voyage to Iceland, where he staged an outrageous coup and ruled the country for two months. 
 
Much lay ahead, from imprisonment in the hulks to patronage by Joseph Banks and travels in Europe as a British spy. But Jorgenson was dogged by his own excesses, and ended up transported as a convict to the very colony he helped to found. Here he reinvented himself again as an explorer, and, despite his sympathy for the people, was caught up in the terrible Aboriginal clearances. Using unpublished sources and letters, Sarah Bakewell tells his astonishing tale with dazzling verve.

The English Dane

From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict

Gavin Francis

* WINNER OF THE SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2013 * 
 
*Shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Prize* 
* Shortlisted for the 2013 RSL Ondaatje Prize * 
* Shortlisted for Banff Adventure Travel Prize * 
* Shortlisted for Saltire Book of the Year Award * 
 
Gavin Francis fulfilled a lifetime's ambition when he spent fourteen months as the base-camp doctor at Halley, a profoundly isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. So remote, it is said to be easier to evacuate a casualty from the International Space Station than it is to bring someone out of Halley in winter. 
 
Antarctica offered a year of unparalleled silence and solitude, with few distractions and very little human history, but also a rare oppurtunity to live among emperor penguins, the only species truly at home in the Antarctic. Following the penguins throughout the year -- from a summer of perpetual sunshine to months of winter darkness -- Gavin Francis explores a world of great beauty conjured from the simplest elements, the hardship of living at 50°C below zero and the unexpected comfort that the penguin community bring.

Empire Antarctica

Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins

Thomas Lynch

In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. He landed in the townland of Moveen, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the thatched cottage that his great-grandfather had left late in the nineteenth century with a one-way ticket to America. Tommy and Nora Lynch, Thomas Lynch's elderly, unmarried, distant cousins welcomed the young American 'home'. In the words of the author, 'it changed my life'. 
 
Booking Passage is part travelogue, part cultural study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch calls 'fellow pilgrims' working their way through their own and the larger histories. It is a magnificent hymn of praise to Ireland.

Booking Passage

We Irish & Americans

'Sara Wheeler is the literary maestro of the earth's frozen regions... The prose is startling and sharp-edged as the icy landscapes themselves' Financial Times 
 
Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers, Sara Wheeler discovers a complex and ambiguous land belonging both to ancient myth and modern controversy. 
 
 The Magnetic North is an adroit combination of history, science and reflection in which Wheeler meditates on the role of the Arctic: fragmented lands which fed imaginations long before the scientists and oilmen showed up (not to mention desperado explorers who ate their own shoes). 
 
The Magnetic North tells of all this, plus gulag ghosts, old and new Russia, colliding cultures and bioaccumulated toxins in polar bears. 
 
'A stylish and engaging account of some of the world's most mysterious, unknowable spots and, like the best travel writing, is infused with the writer's reflections on growing up, life and death' Daily Telegraph

The Magnetic North

Travels in the Arctic

'The next Bill Bryson.’ New York Times 
 
World-weary, distracted and more often than not the worse for wine, Michael Booth really needed to make some major changes to his life. Instead, he embarks on an over-ambitious, self-indulgent attempt to write the definitive book on Indian food, taking his wife and two young children in tow. 
 
They criss-cross India, from mist-shrouded Delhi to Mumbai and the slums of Dharavi, meeting the locals and samplying different cuisines along the way. However, his plan is derailed as he spirals deeper into his metaphysical middle-aged malaise, finally unravelling amid the sweltering heat of the Keralan backwaters. 
 
Fortunately, his wife takes control and enrolls her disintegrating husband in a hardcore yoga boot camp, enlisting a wise meditation guru who helps him chart a path towards enlightenment. But will Booth's cynicism and untrammelled appetites prove his undoing? Can he regain his balance, conquer his anxieties and face up to life as a husband and father?

Eat Pray Eat

Peter Matthiessen

In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea lived a Stone Age tribe which survived into the twentieth century - the Kurelu. Matthiessen joined the Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961which set out to study the tribe as unobtrusively as possible, living among the Kurelu for two seasons. The result was this classic account, not of the expedition but of a lost culture; the Kurelu's timeless rhythms of work and play, of warriorship, feasting and funerals. In Under the Mountain Wall Matthiessen illuminates the lives of the Kurelu's with respect and sympathy, capturing a culture untouched by civilisation and vanishing along with the wilderness lying beneath the dramatic peaks of the Snow Mountains.

Under The Mountain Wall

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