A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul's profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by internationally acclaimed author Paul Theroux. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul's strikingly original responses to India's paralyzing caste system, its acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. This may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

In 1802 William Wordsworth, the great Romantic poet, gazed over London and claimed "Earth has not anything to show more fair". Two centuries after his famous sonnet "Upon Westminster Bridge", That Mighty Heart offers a visual and poetic tribute to a city that today has even stronger claims to be one of the greatest in the world. Designed in the form of seven walks across and around London, and radiating out in all directions from the heart of the city, this book portrays in paint and verse the buildings, parks and sights, both famous and less well-known, that have shaped its history, and contribute to its continuing fascination. The first sequence of poems and paintings focuses on Westminster, taking the reader (and walker) from Westminster Bridge via the Houses of Parliament to Buckingham Palace. The second follows a route through the Kensington area, including Harrods, the Royal Albert Hall and Kensington Palace. The third takes in the British Museum and Covent Garden. The fourth threads its way through the heart of London, from Piccadilly Circus to The Old Bailey, via Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery and Cleopatra's Needle. The fifth crosses the City of London, finishing at the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. The sixth follows the towpath westwards along the south bank of the Thames: Southwark Cathedral and the Shard, the Globe Theatre and the Festival Hall, the Imperial War Museum and the London Eye. The final sequence takes in memorable outlying sites like Hampton Court, Kew Gardens Highgate Cemetery Canary Wharf, Brick Lane, the EIIR Olympic Park and Greenwich. The Introduction provides a concise description of London today and brief history of this remarkable city. Simple and clear maps make it easy for visitors to follow the walks and find their way around London. In words and images That Mighty Heart evokes a place which has gradually changed over the centuries, and yet remains timeless in its beauty and interest.

______________ 'A stylish, deftly erudite and enormously diverting book' - Sunday Telegraph 'An artfully aimless pleasure cruise around Paris' - Guardian 'White's genius as a flaneur is revealed in his affinity for unexpected pleasures, and he includes many for our delectation' - New Yorker ______________ A unique and eclectic view of Paris through the eyes of a fierce and witty intellect. A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the streets he walks - and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic. Acclaimed writer Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the avenues and along the quays, into parts of the city virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many locals, luring the reader into the fascinating and seductive backstreets of his personal Paris. ______________ 'One has the impression of having fallen into the hands of a highly distractible, somewhat eccentric poet and professor who is determined to show you a Paris you wouldn't otherwise see ... White tells such a good story that I'm ready to listen to anything he wants to talk about' - New York Times Book Review

As spring and summer vacations beckon, this book invites and incites a whole new approach to travel. "Postmarks from a Political Traveler" is a series of travel recollections confronting the troubling topics of roots and racism, polar bears and climate change, anti-Americanism, and the war in Afghanistan. The book opens with the story of the author s experience growing up in the Jim Crow South, traveling in apartheid South Africa, and living in the post-apartheid South Africa of 2009 and 2010. It explores the not-so-dissimilar roots and racism of the United States and South Africa, as well as the cross-fertilization of ideas between the two countries. The next installment chronicles two trips to Churchill, Manitoba, where the planet s largest population of polar bears congregate each October. It recounts the dramatic changes that have occurred in both the human and the polar bear communities in just the last decade and shows how the bears have become an Arctic version of the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Then the book shifts to the author s journey back to the United States on a German freighter with a rabidly anti-American captain. Woven into this account of life aboard a long haul ship are threads of the author s travels and anti-American encounters over a decade of living in Africa and Asia. The book concludes with reflections on trips to Afghanistan in 2004 and in 2012, describing the effects of war and conflict zone politics on women, education, refugees, and aid workers. What ties these episodes together is the author s commitment to social justice and to changing the world through travel and writing that is, affirming travel as a political act."

An important work for the nineteenth century history of East Africa. It contains a new introduction with a biographical sketch of Krapf.

Bill Bryson has the rare knack of being out of his depth wherever he goes - even (perhaps especially) in the land of his birth. This became all too apparent when, after nearly two decades in England, the world's best-loved travel writer upped sticks with Mrs Bryson, little Jimmy et al. and returned to live in the country he had left as a youth. Of course there were things Bryson missed about Blighty but any sense of loss was countered by the joy of rediscovering some of the forgotten treasures of his childhood: the glories of a New England autumn; the pleasingly comical sight of oneself in shorts; and motel rooms where you can generally count on being awakened in the night by a piercing shriek and the sound of a female voice pleading, 'Put the gun down, Vinnie, I'll do anything you say.' Whether discussing the strange appeal of breakfast pizza or the jaw-slackening direness of American TV, Bill Bryson brings his inimitable brand of bemused wit to bear on that strangest of phenomena - the American way of life.

The world is full of places that inspire and bring us joy: they might be exceptionally beautiful, resonant with history, untouched by civilisation or rich in memory. This is an atlas that gathers together some of the most enchanting and reinvigorating places around the world in order to heal and captivate, including beautiful destinations in Greece, Italy, Japan, America, Chile and Australia, to name but a few. We’re taken to the tops of mountains, solitary cliffs, elegant cities and also some less expected locations: airports, hydroelectric stations and meteorite craters. Great travellers have always known that travelling can broaden the mind; here we see how it can also heal it. A Therapeutic Atlas reminds us that the world is far broader and more inspiring than we tend to appreciate day to day. Tempting images are combined with short essays that discuss the power of particular places to help us with the difficulties of being human. We locate places that are therapeutic because they coax us out of familiar patterns of thought and liberate our minds. This is a book that can be read when travelling, as a real-life atlas, but as importantly, when travel is difficult, it reminds us that there is no place like home and the sanctuary of our own bed.

Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer's twenty-year love affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London's most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in "the world's most visited city," he rediscovers and reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places, from a lost film by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives hidden in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. This book blends deeply personal writing with a foreigner's observations on a world capital experiencing an unsettling moment of transition. Vanishing Streets builds into an astonishing and innovative multi-layered project combining autobiography, movie madness, and postcard-like annotations on the magical properties of a great city. Tyree argues passionately for London as a cinematic dream city of perpetual fascinations and eccentricities, bridging the past and the present as well as the real and the imaginary.

LONGLISTED FOR RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2021 'Terrific... Britain's urban landscape is just as freighted with myth and mystery as its castles and ancient monuments and [Rees] proves it by unearthing a treasure trove of riveting stories.' - Sunday Times, Best Books of the Year, 2020 ----- There is a Britain that exists outside of the official histories and guidebooks - places that lie on the margins, left behind. A Britain in the cracks of the urban facade where unexpected life can flourish. Welcome to UNOFFICIAL BRITAIN. This is a land of industrial estates, factories and electricity pylons, of motorways and ring roads, of hospitals and housing estates, of roundabouts and flyovers. Places where modern life speeds past but where people and stories nevertheless collect. Places where human dramas play out: stories of love, violence, fear, boredom and artistic expression. Places of ghost sightings, first kisses, experiments with drugs, refuges for the homeless, hangouts for the outcasts. Struck by the power of these stories and experiences, Gareth E. Rees set out to explore these spaces and the essential part they have played in the history and geography of our isles. Though mundane and neglected, they can be as powerfully influential in our lives, and imaginations, as any picture postcard tourist destination. 'Unexpected and fascinating' - Melissa Harrison, author of The Stubborn Light of Things 'The mythical and the municipal collide in a weirdly compelling tour of Britain's built environment.' - Financial Times

Further adventures in extreme (and not so extreme) sports, from the bestselling author of ANGRY WHITE PYJAMAS. Having learnt Aikido with the Tokyo riot police (ANGRY WHITE PYJAMAS) and hunted for the world's longest snake in the jungles of the Far East (BIG SNAKE), Robert Twigger now turns his attention to other traditionally male pursuits and pastimes (some of which are fairly close to home, some of which are more extreme), and looks at the questions these raise about masculinity and the role of man in modern society. BEING A MAN features Twigger participating in, and writing on: the informal rules and thrill seeking of solo climbing, bullfighting in Spain, the 'illicit pleasure of buying my first gun', and the rules of survival with a tribe of Naga headhunters - the sort of activities and pursuits often scorned in the modern, interiorised office-based world.

When Russell Nash was asked to move out to China to commission a mill in Shanghai, he had no idea that it would be the start of a whole new life in the Orient. After having worked for more than twenty years in the animal feed business and watching his children grow up, Russell found himself in a dull life and a stagnant marriage. It was time for a change and a business trip to China was to be the catalyst for Russell's personal revolution. Despite the noise, strange food and the lack of proper queuing etiquette, Russell slowly fell under China's spell and before long found himself returning to the great nation...for good! Entranced by the women, of whom he has plenty of stories to tell, and mesmerised by the unique culture, Russell's adventures abroad are certainly exotic and a world apart from the safe predictable life he'd known in Britain. Funny, cutting, vivid and often explicit, Yellow Fever is the story of Russell's first three years in China and the women who made him want to stay.

A Financial Times Travel Book of the Year 2021 Where can travel writing go in the twenty-first century? Author and lifelong travel writing aficionado Tim Hannigan sets out in search of this most venerable of genres, hunting down its legendary practitioners and confronting its greatest controversies. Is it ever okay for travel writers to make things up, and just where does the frontier between fact and fiction lie? What actually is travel writing, and is it just a genre dominated by posh white men? What of travel writing's queasy colonial connections? Travelling from Monaco to Eton, from wintry Scotland to sun-scorched Greek hillsides, Hannigan swills beer with the indomitable Dervla Murphy, sips tea with the doyen of British explorers, delves into the diaries of Wilfred Thesiger and Patrick Leigh Fermor, and gains unexpected insights from Colin Thubron, Samanth Subramanian, Kapka Kassabova, William Dalrymple and many others. But along the way he realises how much is at stake: can his own love of travel writing survive this journey? The Travel Writing Tribe tackles head on the fierce critical debates usually confined to strictly academic discussions of the genre. This highly original book compels readers and travellers of all kinds to think about travel writing in new ways.

This book considers how contemporary travelers from Latin America write their journeys at and about home. How do Latin American writers of the late twentieth-century negotiate the hybrid and volatile category of travel writing, which has been shaped in large part by myriad Euro-American travelers? How do they engage with the enduring myths about the region perpetuated by their imperial/ist predecessors? And, if not journeys of expansion or exploration, on precisely what kinds of travel do their own journeys rest? Drawing on ideas from many disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, sociology, literary and cultural studies, this book considers contemporary journey narratives from Latin America through a series of case studies concerning four key sites of travel, each of which engenders particular forms of travel and travel narrative: Patagonia, the Andes, Mexico and the Mexico-US border. This book thus explores the complex practice and representation of journeys in the region by writers including Luis Sepulveda, Mempo Giardinelli, Andres Ruggeri, Ana Garcia Bergua, Silvia Molina, Maria Luisa Puga, Ruben Martinez and Luis Alberto Urrea. In doing so, it explores questions relating to mobility, representation, and globalization that are of widespread concern across the world today."

Undertaken for the purpose of promoting legitimate trade in Central Africa, the Richardson mission was a compound of philanthropic and diplomatic interests advocated by Richardson. His main targets were the Sahara, Bornu and the Sudan.

Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestseller and prize-wining Walking Home, the restless poet has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home. In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain's south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finsh. From the surreal pleasuredome of Minehead Butlins to a smoke-filled roundhouse on the Penwith Peninsula then out to the Isles of Scilly and beyond, Armitage tackles this personal Odyssey with all the poetic reflection and personal wit we've come to expect of one of Britain's best loved and most popular writers.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two vast lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a civilizational crossroads. The Lakes are set within the mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and crowned by the old Roman road, the via Egnatia. Once a trading and spiritual nexus of the southern Balkans, it remains one of Eurasia's oldest surviving religious melting pots. With their remote rock churches, changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the Lakes live in their own time. By exploring the stories of dwellers past and present, Kassabova uncovers the human history shaped by the Lakes. Soon, her journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.

In 2019, Nick Butter became the first person to run a marathon in every country on Earth. This is Nick's story of his world record-breaking adventure and the extraordinary people who joined him along the way.

On January 6th 2018, Nick Butter tied his laces and stepped out on to an icy pavement in Toronto, where he began to take the first steps of an epic journey that would see him run 196 marathons in every one of the world's 196 countries. Spending almost two years on the road and relying on the kindness of strangers to keep him moving, Nick's odyssey allowed him to travel slowly, on foot, immersing himself in the diverse cultures and customs of his host nations.

Running through capital cities and deserts, around islands and through spectacular landscapes, Nick dodges bullets in Guinea-Bissau, crosses battlefields in Syria, survives a wild dog attack in Tunisia and runs around an erupting volcano in Guatemala. Along the way, he is often joined by local supporters and fellow runners, curious children and bemused passers-by. Telling their stories alongside his own, Nick captures the unique spirit of each place he visits and forges a new relationship with the world around him.

Running the World captures Nick's journey as he sets three world records and covers over five thousand miles. As he recounts his adventures, he shares his unique perspective on our glorious planet, celebrates the diversity of human experience, and reflects on the overwhelming power of running.

The legendary travel writer drives the entire length of the US–Mexico border, then takes the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind the everyday headlines.

Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol to the north and mounting discord from within. With the same humanizing sensibility that he employed in Deep South, Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as family members brave the journey north.

From the writer praised for his “curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms” (The New York Times Book Review), On the Plain of Snakes is an exploration of a region in conflict.

LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE In frantic flight from the Vietnam War, Jay Parini leaves the United States for Scotland. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. The pair embark on a trip to the Scottish Highlands, and on the way the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of western literature and ideas while promising to teach him about love and poetry. Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It's also a magical tour of an era - like our own - in which uncertainties abound, and when - as ever - it's the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.

No other vessel-sail or power driven-had ever passed through the dangerous straits of the Northwest Passage and completed a voyage round the world before David Scott Cowper's daring journey in the converted RNLI life boat Mabel E. Holland. David Scott Cowper vividly describes his four year circumnavigation by way of the Northwest Passage, detailing his recovery of a boat sunk by Arctic ice and the adventure and hardship of a grueling non-stop voyage across the Pacific in a small power boat. In the annals of small-boat voyages, this one stands out by any measure; not only because of the enormous difficulties and the tenacity with which they were overcome, but because of the extraordinary fascination and unspoilt beauty of the Arctic. The book is enhanced by Scott Cowper's photographs taken during the journey.

Shortlisted for the The Great Outdoors Awards - Outdoor Book of the Year 2020 Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature 2020 There are strange relics hidden across Scotland's landscape: forgotten places that are touchstones to incredible stories and past lives which still resonate today. Yet why are so many of these 'wild histories' unnoticed and overlooked? And what can they tell us about our own modern identity? From the high mountain passes of an ancient droving route to a desolate moorland graveyard, from uninhabited post-industrial islands and Clearance villages to caves explored by early climbers and the mysterious strongholds of Christian missionaries, Patrick Baker makes a series of journeys on foot and by paddle. Along the way, he encounters Neolithic settlements, bizarre World War Two structures, evidence of illicit whisky production, sacred wells and Viking burial grounds. Combining a rich fusion of travelogue and historical narrative, he threads themes of geology, natural and social history, literature, and industry from the places he visits, discovering connections between people and place more powerful than can be imagined.

Italian Days is one of the richest and most absorbing travel books ever written"a journey down the Italian peninsula that immerses us in the inexhaustible plenty of that culture and the equally bountiful intelligence and sensibility of its author. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, noted essayist, journalist, and fiction writer, brings us a fascinating mixture of history, politics, folklore, food, architecture, arts, and literature, studded with local anecdotes and personal reflections. From modern, fashionable Milan; to beautiful, historic Rome with its modern traffic and, even today, its sudden displays of faith; to primitive, brooding Calabria, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison reveals in all its glory and confusion her Italy, the country of her origins, where the keys to her past are held by those who never left. Beautifully and eloquently rendered, Italian Days is a deeply engaging travelogue, but it is much more as well. It is the story of a return home"of friends, family, and faith"and of the search for the good life that propels all of us on our journeys wherever we are.

"Fresh and diverting, informative and topical without being slight or ephemeral. This supremely well-edited combination of current affairs, journalism, commentary, and fun facts is perfect for our pause-button moment." -Australian Financial Review, Best Books of the Year Fully illustrated, The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, art and reportage from around the world. IN THIS VOLUME: Growing Uncertainty in California's Central Valley by Anna Wiener * What Does It Mean to Be a Solution? by Vanessa Hua * Shadows in the Valley by Francisco Cantu. Plus: direct democracy and unsustainable development, the rise of the Land Back movement, LA's cultural renaissance in the face of rampant gentrification, visions of the future, the death of the Californian Dream, the burning of Paradise and much more . . . "Wildfire season had already begun, and, as the car pitched along the road through Kings Canyon, I tried to tamp down a feeling like dread. In California, where the effects of global warming are pervasive and unsubtle, spending time in the forest always makes me feel unspeakably lucky and dizzy with remorse. Families in masks stomped through the Giant Forest to pose for photographs in front of General Sherman, a 275-foot-tall tree. Children licked ice-cream bars by the visitor center. In the parking lot, some of the oldest living trees in the world shaded eight-seat SUVs: Kia Tellurides, Chevy Tahoes, Toyota Sequoias." -From "Growing Uncertainty in California's Central Valley" by Anna Wiener

We meet Freddy, Phil and Don - the hilarious, yet deep thinking, tales of three retired men determined to keep hiking to the bitter end in their beloved Peak District - but each for very different reasons...Phil - a former air-traffic controller and the group's self-appointed leader - is on a mission not to grow old. He believes his combination of obsessive physical exercise and the latest health supplements will hold back time. Freddy - a shambolic slacker who prefers to stroll and smell the flowers. Freddy's eternal mission is to find the meaning of life. Until he does, he takes consolation in outmanoeurvring the vulgar, aspirational world around him Thankfully they have Don to calm the waters. All Don asks for in return is some peace, tranquility and perhaps a decent pint when they reach their destination.