'Magnificent' Robert MacfarlaneWinner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the YearOur lives depend on shipping but it is a world which is largely hidden from us.
I am taking a few months off to travel and wander, drinking my way across the Islamic world to see whether I can dry myself out, cure myself of a bout of alcoholic excess.
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.
In 1938 Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to discover the state of the country and its people in the aftermath of the brutal anti-clerical purges of President Calles.
In-Flight Entertainment is a classic humour book, an air steward's account of fourteen years' worth of airline incidents, reminding us of the absurdities of flying.
American journalist Alice Steinbach took a year off to live in five cities - Paris, Venice, Milan, London and Oxford - when she realized she had entered a new phase of life.
Ludicrous, heart-warming and improbably inspirational, Spanish Steps is the story of what happens when a rather silly man tries to walk all the way across a very large country, with a very large animal who doesn't really want to.
A magnet for trade and travellers from all over the world, stylish, cosmopolitan Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and legendary beauty, but also of civil wars, bloody religious purges, and the tragedy of Anne Frank.
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.
As Islam and the West prepare to clash once again, Jason Webster embarks on a quest to discover Spain's hidden Moorish legacy and lift the lid on a country once forged by both Muslims and Christians.
Howard Marks was released from Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana in April 1995 after serving seven years of a twenty-five year sentence for marijuana smuggling.
For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been too dangerous to travel through, bedevilled by a uniquely brutal form of violence from which sprang many of Africa's cruellest contemporary icons - child soldiers, prisoner mutilation, blood diamonds.
In a series of remarkable books - Travels in a Thin Country, Terra Incognita, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry Garrard, Too Close to the Sun and The Magnetic North - Sara Wheeler has shown that she is not only one of the finest travel writers of her generation but a very fine biographer too.
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.
Peter Robb's journey into the dark heart of Sicily uses history, painting, literature and food to shed light on southern Italy's legacy of political corruption and violent crime.
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.
Summoned to Whitehall in 1949, Laurens van der Post was told that in old British Central Africa there were two large tracts of country that London didn't really know anything about, and could he go in there on foot and take a look, please?
In this moving sequel to The Lost World of the Kalahari van der Post records everything he has learned of the life and lore of Africa's first inhabitants.
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?
Danny Wallace wanted to write about a place so special and so crucial to our existence that it had never before been tackled: the Centre of the Universe.
Tired of his life as a globe-trotting journalist, and desperate to finish his latest novel, writer Derek Lambert decides to settle with his new wife and young son in a mouldering casita nestled among citrus groves inland of the Costa Blanca.
