What in the world has the power to liberate women in Iran while provoking antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in Scotland, to lure Nigerians to the cold of the Ukraine while heating up class warfare in the US heartlands, and both profit local gangsters and create local - and international - celebrities?
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year Award'Extraordinary' Daily Telegraph'Breathtaking' Guardian Skybound by Rebecca Loncraine is a book for anyone who has looked up and longed to take flight.
In Going to Extremes writer, presenter and Oxford geography don Nick Middleton visits Oymyakon in Siberia, where the average winter temperature is -47 degrees and 40% of the population have lost their fingers to frostbite while changing the car wheel.
A journey through one of the world's most divided cities - Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine, exploring the influence of the history, religion and myth on the country's tumultuous present.
Oliver Sacks, the bestselling author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is most famous for his studies of the human mind: insightful and beautifully characterized portraits of those experiencing complex neurological conditions.
A journey along the greatest land route on earth, from the master of travel writing Colin Thubron On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey.
'One of the finest books about contemporary Russia' ObserverThis is the account of Thubron's 15,000-mile journey through an astonishing country - one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth.
From her early childhood, when her inspirational mother would take her on trips along her beloved Ridgeway in a horse-drawn cart, Candida Lycett Green has retained a love of green lanes and tracks, of moving along at horse's pace and casting an eye on the beauty of England through the back door.
John Gimlette's travels through this harsh and awesome landscape, the eastern extreme of the Americas, broadly mirrors that of Dr Eliot Curwen, his great-grandfather, who spent a summer there as a doctor in 1893, and who was witness to some of the most beautiful ice and cruelest poverty in the British Empire.
Elizabeth Bowen's account of a time spent in Rome is no ordinary guidebook but an evocation of a city - its history, its architecture and, above all, its atmosphere.
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.
For a Pagan Song tells the story of how Jonny Bealby follows in the footsteps of his two heroes from literature, Kipling and Dravot, travelling across remote parts of India and Pakistan and into war-torn Afghanistan.
Sir Mark Tully is one of the world's leading writers and broadcasters on India, and the presenter of the much loved radio programme 'Something Understood'.
Definitely not for those of you who are contemplating taking on Mount Everest or the Amazon, but this simple guide is the most sensible thing to pack for a business trip or holiday.
This charming book takes you through the counties of England, exploring Saxon churches, reflective of simple faith; Norman churches with rugged arches and powerful pillars, stamping their authority, gothic churches with their soaring arches; Decorated and Perpendicular churches made glorious with Early English style and craftsmanship; Victorian churches, resplendent with imperial pomp; eccentric Arts and Crafts churches.
In I Never Knew That About New York Christopher Winn digs beneath the gleaming towers and mean streets of New York and discovers its secrets and its hidden treasures.
Foreigners who spend time in Russia soon discover two distinct worlds: the public Russia, often perceived as cold and shadowed, cautious and traditional; and the private Russia, where warmth and hospitality flourish over tea at a friend's kitchen table or saut ed mushrooms in a village dacha.
To the armchair fan, the life of the sports writer is one of unalloyed joy: all-expenses-paid trips to the most exciting events in the world, the best seats in the house, and one-on-one interviews with Anna Kournikova.
Catching all the fascination and humour of travel in out-of-the-way places, One's Company is Peter Fleming's account of his journey through Russia and Manchuria to China when he was Special Correspondent to The Times in the 1930s.
* 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.
In 1991 Mariusz Wilk, a Polish journalist long fascinated by the mysteries of the Russian soul, decided to take up residence in the Solovki islands, a lonely archipelago lost amid the far northern reaches of Russia's White Sea.
In a memoir as vivid and unpredictable as any novel we follow Roger Garfitt on his journey from stable boy to jazz dancer, from Oxford dandy to Sixties drop-out.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOWIn 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PICO IYERIn September 1947, long before mass tourism and with no knowledge of Spanish, Christopher Isherwood and William Caskey left for a six-month tour of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina.
