A real-life "Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Company We Keep" is a portrait by bestselling CIA operative Robert Baer ("See No Evil") and his CIA shooter wife, Dayna, of life as it's really lived by a CIA couple.

Everest was, to George Mallory, 'the wildest dream'. This gentleman adventurer was obsessed with taming the unconquered peak. But in 1924 he and climbing partner Sandy Irvine disappeared forever into the clouds encircling the peak. Might they have reached the summit before their tragedy? It is mountaineering's greatest mystery. Seventy-five years later, Conrad Anker made an extraordinary discovery. He spotted 'a patch of white' on Everest's North Face. It was Mallory's frozen body. Artefacts found on Mallory's body implied that he might have made it to the top. But that route had never since been climbed without modern equipment. Was it possible? To find out Anker returned to Everest, with death-defying young 'rock star' of climbing Leo Houlding as his partner. Kitted out in period clothing, they set off to replicate the unaided climb. Mallory's fate was a chilling reminder of the mountain's might. But they knew that to solve Everest's greatest mystery they must push their very limits.

It's a seemingly smaller planet we inhabit these days, a world in which there's hardly an unexplored square inch left (or from which you can't surf the World Wide Web or cell-phone a friend). Classic Exploration Stories returns us to a time when there were places still to be discovered, when brave travellers could venture into uncharted regions. Among the sources from which editor Stephen Brennan has selected excerpts for this stirring anthology are: The Voyages of St. Brendan; The Icelandic Sagas; The Travels of Marco Polo; The Voyages of Jacques Cartier; Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle; The Life of Captain Mathew; Flinders; The Perry Expedition To Japan; Edward S. Ellis's The Life of Kit Carson; Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad; Fridtjof Nansen's Farthest North; Ernest Shackleton's South; Richard Harding Davis's Real Soldiers of Fortune