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.
The Gentle Art of Tramping is a practical guide to long-distance walking and a philosophical account of human restlessness and the desire to connect with nature.
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.
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.
**TOP TEN BESTSELLER**'I would rather read Colin Thubron than any other travel writer alive' John Simpson Mount Kailas is the most sacred of the world's mountains - holy to one fifth of humanity.
Leslie Thomas's odyssey is a vivid, personal account of the most fascinating islands at the furthest reaches of the globe: to islands as distant and diverse as Saint-Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland and Great Barrier Island off New Zealand, and to places more familiar by name, including Nantucket, Fair Isle, Tahiti, and Capri, this journey voyages to the world's smaller places.
Freddy, Phil and Don are three grumpy old men, travelling at various speeds in the slow lane of retirement, at a loss to understand the mad modern world around them.
