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

The strike of 1984/5 cut deep into the traditional mining communities yet in the midst of this wholesale destruction something unexpected happened. From the dark corners of obscurity came the voices of the wives, mothers and daughters of miners - previously unheard, inexperienced, unrehearsed. Out of desperation they found the strength and courage to not only stand and fight alongside their men but to become political activists in their own right. Overnight they mastered the media, learnt which journalists to trust and began to appear in the newspapers, and on radio and TV. But when the strike ended in defeat the media lost interest. The women were dumped, allowed to slip back into the shadows. For some the strike brought about a change; they had seen an existence beyond the slagheaps and embraced it. For others the end of the strike meant coming back to earth with a bump. Two decades later Triona Holden, who was one of the BBC correspondents reporting on the strike, takes the reader into the lives of these remarkable women and reveals that what is good and inextinguishable about the mining communities lives on in these women's articulate, funny and frank stories.

Everyone knows about Britain in the 1950s, a stuffy old place where there was only one television channel, where 'Uncle Mac' played records on the wireless for children every Saturday morning, where most people really did go to church on Sunday. Growing up in a small Cheshire village during this monochrome decade, Ken Blakemore's experiences were rather more surreal. His recreation of these days reveals the alarmingly eccentric characters that peopled his world, and the peculiar goings-on that enlivened everyday life. In what is more a biography of a decade than an autobiography, the author's life is just a background narrative thread running through the book, while each chapter focuses on a theme - school, food, radio and TV, and transport, for example. Sunnyside Down paints a gently humorous picture of growing up in the 1950s that will appeal to anyone who was there, and also to a younger audience.