This book ventures into the world beyond Lampedusa: the crisis belt that stretches from Kashmir across Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Arab world and beyond, to the borders and coasts of Europe. Celebrated author Navid Kermani reports from a region which is our immediate neighbour, despite all too often being depicted as remote and distant from our daily concerns. Kermani has visited the places where no CNN transmitter truck is parked and yet smouldering fires threaten world peace. In his widely praised, wonderfully agile and careful prose, he reports on NATO's war in Afghanistan and the underside of globalization in India, on the civil war in Syria and the struggle of Shiites and Kurds against the 'Islamic State' in Iraq. He was the only Western reporter present at the suppression of the mass protests in Tehran, travelled with Sufis through Pakistan, talked with Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf, and observed the disastrous Mediterranean refugee route in Lampedusa. Kermani's gripping reports allow us to understand a world in turmoil, to share the suspense and the suffering of the people in it. As if by magic, he brings individual lives and situations to life so vividly that complex and seemingly distant problems of world politics suddenly appear crystal clear. Our world too lies beyond Lampedusa.

A postmodern romp through the rain forest, "Equatoria" is both travelog and cultural critique. On the right-hand pages, the Prices chronicle their 1990 artefact-collecting expedition up the rivers of French Guiana, and on the left, they feature extracts from the works of Jonathan Swift, Joseph Conrad, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Alex Haley, James Clifford, Eric Hobsbawm, Germaine Greer and even the noted anthropologist James Goodfellow (who asks for more sex). Also included are quotes from the nurses, doctors, tourists, convicts and countless others who live in the French penal colony-turned-space center in tropical South America. Charged with acquiring objects for a new museum, the Prices kept a log of their day-to-day adventures and misadventures, constantly confronting their ambivalence about the act of collecting, the very possibility of exhibiting cultures and the future of anthropology.

At the end of the 1830s, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, two famous accounts, through foreign eyes, were being written about Russia. By far the better known one is the Marquis de Custine's Russia in 1839. For all its brilliance, however, it doesn't begin to compete with J. G. Kohl's slightly later work, just called Russia, when it comes to thoroughness, range and sympathy of observation. Kohl was a German. Unlike de Custine, who only made a brief visit, he spent several years in Russia. He assimilated himself, learnt the language and enjoyed the experience. He set himself the task of writing about 'general features and popular manners of a large portion of the Russian Empire'. and succeeded with warm-heartedness and tolerance. It is refreshing to read such a positive account. For example, St Petersburg appeared to him not only a beautiful but a cheerful city with its dashing izvoztchiks, its crowded market-places, its frequent fetes, when high and low mixed together. He was not afraid of paradox, of Russia itself writing, 'There is perhaps no country in the world where all classes are so intimately connected with each other as in this vast empire, or so little divided into castes. Contrary to the prevailing belief, in no country are the extremes of society brought into more frequent contact, and in few are the transitions from one class to another more frequent or sudden. The peasant becomes a priest on the same day perhaps than an imperial mandate degrades the noble to a peasant or to a Siberian colonist. Hereditary rank is disregarded while public services often lead rapidly to the highest dignities. Even serfs are more nomadic in their habits than our free German peasants.' The English translation was first published in 1842.

The river Tigris is in danger. It has been the lifeblood of ancient Mesopotamia and modern Iraq, but geopolitics and climate change have left the birthplace of civilisation at risk of becoming uninhabitable. In 2021, adventurer Leon McCarron travelled by boat along the full length of the river, in search of hope. From the source, where Assyrian kings had their images carved into stone, McCarron and his small team journeyed through the Turkish mountains, across north-east Syria and into the heart of Iraq. Passing by historic cities like Diyarbakir, Mosul and Baghdad, McCarron kept the company of fishermen and farmers, but also artists, activists and archaeologists who rely on the flow of the river. Occasionally harassed by militias, often helped by soldiers, McCarron rode his luck in areas still troubled by ISIS and relied on the generosity of a network of strangers to reach the Persian Gulf. Wounded Tigris is the story of what humanity stands to lose with the death of a great river, and what can be done to try to save it.

In this, the sequel to Slow Boats to China (also reissued in Faber Finds), Gavin Young tells, with equal panache, of his return voyage from the China Seas to England, via the South Seas, Cape Horn and West Africa. 'I am decidedly envious of Gavin Young and his Slow Boats Home, successor to his highly entertaining Slow Boats to China . . . a fascinating, memorable book.' Eric Newby, the Guardian 'Like Slow Boats to China this is likely to become a classic of travel.' Francis King, the Spectator

To the Frontier is the compelling and vivid account of Geoffrey Moorhouse's three-month journey through Sind, Baluchistan and the Punjab to the legendary North-West frontier of Pakistan. From there he reached the closed Khyber Pass and the border with Afghanistan which he was - uniquely - permitted to cross, and scaled the highest peaks of the Hindu Kush. Moorhouse's evocation of a beautiful, turbulent and little-known region is masterly and unforgettable. 'It was high time someone put Pakistan on the travel bookshelf, and this is what Geoffrey Moorhouse has done - with style, relish, much wit and enormous good humour ... No one has better captured the scenic contrasts of this diverse country.' Sunday Telegraph

In Om Geoffrey Moorhouse records his travels across South India in 1992, from the places of worship he visited to the wide range of people he met on his way - the pilgrims and supplicants, agnostics and holy men and women, politicians and the last survivor of the pre-Independence princes. An honest and unflinching account of a deeply personal spiritual quest, Om also brilliantly evokes the frustrations and delights of India.

'A remarkable book ... Humble and sensitive, with a complete lack of pretension, Om is both a lesson in how to write about a foreign culture and an inspiration to read.' "Independent"

Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore. Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.

'All mountaineers develop differently. Some go higher, some try ever-steeper faces and others specialise in a particular range or region. I am increasingly drawn to remoteness - to places where few others have trod.' The Wild Within is the third book from Simon Yates, one of Britain's most accomplished and daring mountaineers. With his insatiable appetite for adventure and exploratory mountaineering, Yates leads unique expeditions to unclimbed peaks in the Cordillera Darwin in Tierra del Fuego, the Wrangell St-Elias ranges on the Alaska-Yukon border, and Eastern Greenland. Laced with dry humour, he relates his own experience of the rapid commercialisation of mountain wilderness, while grappling with his new-found commitments as a family man. At the same time he must endure his role in the film adaptation of Joe Simpson's Touching The Void, having to relive the events of that trip to Peru for a Hollywood director. Yates' subsequent escape to the some of the world's most remote mountains isn't quite the experience it once was, as he witnesses first hand the advance of modern communications into the wilderness, signalled by the ubiquitous mobile phone masts appearing in once-deserted mountain valleys. He is left to dwell on the remaining significance of mountain wilderness and must rediscover what the notion of 'wild' means for him now.

Starting near the roof of the world on the Soviet Union's border with China, Geoffrey Moorhouse's journey through Central Asia winds across mountains, steppes and desert as well as the path of the retreating Red Army before reaching Tamburlaine's tomb in Samarakand. The sequel to his award winning To the Frontier, Apples in the Snow is both a dramatic history of this wild region and an absorbing portrait of its present. 'A beautifully written account ... Moorhouse is one of the great travellers: everywhere attuned to past and present, to the uneasiness and muted discords of the people about him, to the mundane, the ridiculous and the extraordinary beauties of Central Asia.' Guardian

'Delightful . . . the ideal book to take with you on holiday.' Independent 'Rankin is a wizard of digression and cross-reference . . . He is a natural sleuth, writes well in slim nuggety paragraphs, and he teaches us a great deal about Stevenson en route.' Richard Holmes First published to widespread acclaim in 1987, Nicholas Rankin's account of a journey in pursuit of Robert Louis Stevenson has won plaudits ever since for its blend of scholarship and flair. Through Europe and America, from the Highlands of Scotland to the islands of the Pacific, Rankin explores an offbeat and enthralling trail, charting how a Scottish bohemian became an honorary chief among the Samoans, and how a European aesthete turned to Pacific politics. At once a pioneering travel book, an eye-opening biography and a critical reassessment of a remarkable man of letters, Dead Man's Chest is a unique and absorbing study of one of the most influential figures in the English-speaking world.

From the present-day street life of Ginza, to the heights of Mount Fuji in the company of 16th-century traveller and poet Basho: the most recent addition of Eland's through writers' eyes series brings together a chorus of voices from Japan and across the globe. Detailed introductions stemming from Elizabeth Ingram's own experiences as a traveller, (later a resident) and journalist in Japan, develop a lively and intimate portrait of towns and provinces, making it an ideal companion. A library in the palm of your hand: extracts of prose, poetry and novels from a rich variety of writers, including Jan Morris, Nicolas Bouvier, Oswald Wynd, Peter Popham, Basho, Yasunari Kawabata, Alan Booth, Futabei Shimei, Angela Carter, Joao Rodrigues and Mary Crawford Fraser. It is a source book for those visiting Japan for the first time and for expatriates. One must never forget that for all the talk of the new Asia, the Japanese economy is still bigger than that of India and China combined.

Martyn Murray was finding modern life, with all its restrictions and controls, suffocating. Following years of soul-searching, his father's death triggered him into opening the old logbooks and charts to retrace the sailing trips they had once shared together. He determined to revisit those waters and bring home the freedom of the seas. Falling in love with an old ketch in Ireland, he bought and restored her enough to sail back to Scotland. Over the next two summers he cruised Scotland's Western Isles, with one goal: to reach St Kilda - the remotest part of the British Isles, 40 miles from the Outer Hebrides. During his cruising he considered the islanders and their sense of freedom - often restricted by absentee landlords and officialdom. He riled against bureaucracy and commercial enterprise restricting the yachtsman's ability to roam free. For parts of his journey he was joined by the beguiling Kyla; a rare, independent spirit who both excited and frustrated Martyn. But much of Martyn's voyaging was undertaken alone, encountering a variety of places, situations and characters along the way. He attempted his long-awaited sail out to St Kilda through the teeth of a storm, believing that achieving this feat would bring him the freedom and clarity that he craved. What he came up against was far more testing and turbulent than the tides and gales of the North Atlantic. As he sailed back to the mainland things fell into place: a sense of achievement in completing the arduous voyage alone, but - most of all - an understanding of who he is, clarity on his relationship with Kyla and a real sense of his own freedom.

In 2014, a coup d'etat in Sanaa paved the way for a devastating conflict in Yemen. Doctor Andrew Moscrop cancelled plans to return to the country that he had once called home. Instead, he returned to his diaries and delved into memories of a time when he lived in a rambling old tower house in Sanaa. As the war unfolded, he re-read the accounts of past travellers to the country. And while working in Greece, treating refugees from other Middle Eastern war zones, he began writing a book set in Yemen. Both a personal travelogue and a thought-provoking study of past travellers in Yemen, The Camel's Neighbour offers a unique window into the country. Importantly, it delivers a context and a valuable corrective to the dehumanising stories of conflict and crisis that have characterised this corner of Arabia in recent years. Evocative descriptions of Sanaa and its unique cityscape, as well as empathetic portrayals of people encountered and events experienced, all create a narrative by turns contemplative and unexpected. The author finds himself caught up in the fallout of the Danish Cartoon Crisis, is involved in an outbreak of polio, and witnesses close-up the distinctly undemocratic re-election of Yemen's President. Meanwhile, his sense of humour is tested when he gatecrashes the Queen's birthday party at the British Embassy and is urinated upon by a goat during a hair-raising car journey. Examining the impressions of earlier visitors, Moscrop explores how Yemen has been seen and understood by foreigners from Europe and America. These past visitors include blundering missionaries, avaricious merchants, aristocratic Englishmen, and unlikely spies such as Norman Lewis and Freya Stark. Moscrop delivers an intriguing and original perspective on Western encounters with the Islamic world, examining the imagery and cliches by which Yemen has been represented from the sixteenth century to the present. Ultimately, he unravels a story of how Yemen became an 'unknown country' with a 'forgotten war'.

What is the purpose of travel in an age when millions are displaced against their will or have no home to speak of in the first place? How can we travel without being tourists, without erasing the stories of those who live where we visit? These are some of the questions addressed in Cristian Aliaga's compelling collection of prose poems, Music for Unknown Journeys. This collection contains Aliaga's "travelling sketches," in the tradition of Matsuo Basho, John Berger, or W.G. Sebald. Each prose poem is geographically situated in his travels across Patagonia or his more recent journeys around the edge-lands of Europe. His work is politically acute, exploring struggles over territory, resources, and culture, in the places he visits. There is an intense emotional charge as he records the stories of those who globalization and contemporary capitalism have used and left behind. This volume brings together a generous selection of Aliaga's prose poems, the majority previously unseen in English, as well as a substantial introduction to the author's work and its context, both literary and political, by the editor and translator. Cristian Aliaga (b. 1962, Tres Cuervos, Province of Buenos Aires) is one of Argentina's foremost contemporary poets. His work has been highly praised in the TLS and elsewhere.

Brought up on stories and myths of the Kalahari Bushmen, Rupert Isaacson journeys to the dry vast grassland--which stretches across South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia--to find out the truth behind these childhood stories. Deep in the Kalahari, Isaacson meets the last groups of Bushmen still living the traditional way, caught between their ancient culture and the growing need to protect and reclaim their dwindling hunting grounds. Little by little he is drawn into the fascinating web of ritual and prophecy that make up the Bushman reality. He hears of shamans who turn into lions, sees leopards conjured from the landscape as though by magic. He attends trance-inducing dances and witnesses incredible healings. But he also sees the heart-wrenching social problems of a dispossessed people. What follows is an adventure of an intensity he could never have predicted. "The Healing Land records Isaacson's personal transformation amid these extraordinary people, and his passionate contribution to their political struggle. It captures his enchantment with the character, corruption, kindness, and confusion of a place that has wrenched itself from the Stone Age into the new millennium.

This wild and comic tale of Middle East misadventure is "a very funny and frequently insightful look at the world's most combustible region. Fearlessness is a valuable quality in a travel writer, and Mr. Horwitz . . . seems as intrepid as they come".--The New York Times Book Review.

Whether he's looking for wild orangutans on Borneo or diving off the coast of South Africa, Randy Wayne White is one of America's most adventurous travelers. In Last Flight Out, White challenges and charms us with tales of his excursions into the dangerous, into the ludicrous, and - especially - into the heart of humanity.
Randy White is a "mover" and has no time for people who can't keep up. Join him as he dives in the infamous lake called the Bad Blue Hole on the desolate Cat Island in the Bahamas. Search for the perfect hot pepper in Colombia, and closer to home; go raccoon hunting in Pioneer, Ohio, where the hunted almost always outsmart the hunters. Get in the ring with Shine Forbes, an eighty-year-old fighter in prime condition and Ernest Hemingway's former sparring partner, and go on a secret mission to steal back General Manuel Noriega's bar stools. Though he rarely finds what he's looking for - such as the half-human, half-alligator creature known as "Gatorman" - he cultivates his unique ability to revel in the unique and comical situations of each exotic trip.
From a jungle survival school in Panama to a week at a professional wrestler's training camp, White leaves the reader mesmerized by the potential of undiscovered places and the promise of endless adventure in unfamiliar territory. An icon of the new breed of thick-skinned, high endurance travelers, Randy White is the real deal.

The subzero temperatures were only one of the dangers explorer Frederick Cook (1865-1940) faced in his attempts to reach the North Pole. During his extraordinary and harrowing journey, he fought off arctic wolves and polar bears, lived through ice storms, almost starved on several occasions, and faced long and lonely hours of isolation. His book relates how he learned from Eskimos how to survive in the Arctic, hunting musk ox to survive, harpooning walruses, and traveling by dog sled. After his journey, he defended himself against the charges of fellow explorer Robert Peary, who claimed that Cook had lied about reaching the Pole. My Attainment of the Pole is not only a great read for any armchair explorer, it is also a controversial work that contributed to a dispute that lasted for decades.

Saturnine and quick-tempered, the formidable North Sea is often overlooked - even by those living within a stone's throw of its steel-grey waters. But as playground, theatre of war and cultural crossing-point, it has shaped the world in myriad ways, forged villains and heroes, and determined the fates of nations. It's not all grim, though: the seaside holiday was born on North Sea beaches, and artists, poets and writers have been as equally inspired by glinting sun on the wave-tops as they have the drama of a winter storm. With a wry eye and a warm coat, Tom Blass travels the edges of the North Sea meeting fishermen, artists, bomb disposal experts, burgermeisters - and those who have found themselves flung to the sea's perimeters quite by chance. In doing so he attempts to piece together its manifold histories and to reveal truths, half-truths and fictions otherwise submerged...

Island of Lightning is the latest book of travel essays by the prizewinning Robert Minhinnick, poet, novelist, translator, cultural commentator and environmentalist. In it he travels from his home in south Wales to Argentina, China, Finland, Iraq, Tuscany and Piemonte, Malta, New York, Zagreb, Lithuania and the lightning island of Malta. In conventional travel essays and leaps of imaginative narrative his subjects include the annual Elvis convention in Porthcawl, Neolithic sculptures, the cruelties of late twentieth century communism and its aftermath, rugby union, the Argentinian writer Alfonsina Storni, poets playing football, the body of a saint and the definition of cool. His themes are big ones: the relationship of man and landscape, man and time, man and nature, immigration and war, in one sense ultimately humankind itself. Minhinnick explores with the eye of a poet and the gift of a telling image or metaphor. His walk from Cardiff to the Rhondda valleys is almost geological as he passes through the social and cultural strata of the area's history. His astonishment at the sheer number of people - the scale on which society works - in China, results in an inventive grappling with the hugeness of the world (and its growing problems). At the other end of the spectrum his re-imagining of the life of Alfonsina Storni, her love for Borges and her suicide is a delicate commentary on the personal and the solitary. Readers will be entertained, informed and provoked by this series of essays in which Minhinnick takes his subjects as though holding them in his hand, turning them for new perspectives and understanding.

This book, first published in 1903, is an account of Lafcadio Hearn's insights and experiences of Japan. Hearn, known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo, was an international writer who was best known for his books about Japan and Japanese culture. This book will be of interest to students of history and Asian Studies.

"This is a book ripped from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter to recently thriving downtowns stripped of office workers and service workers. Those catching the brunt of it all, those with the steepest hills to climb, may have been fucked at birth. But for everyone, as Maharidge observes, the feeling of safety is folly. A sharp wake-up call to heed the new Depression and to recognize the humanity of those hit hardest." -Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW "Dale Maharidge takes us coast to coast in 2020, down highways along which he first reported decades ago. His honed class awareness-unrivaled among contemporary journalists-reveals that today's confluent health, economic and social crises are the logical conclusion to generations of unvalidated, untreated despair in a wealthy nation. Forget hollow commentary from detached television news studios in New York City. Fucked at Birth is the truth." -Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class. Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth. Motivated by this haunting phrase-"Fucked at Birth"-Maharidge explores the realities of being poor in America in the coming decade, as pandemic, economic crisis and social revolution up-end the country. Part raw memoir, part dogged, investigative journalism, Fucked At Birth channels the history of poverty in America to help inform the voices Maharidge encounters daily. In an unprecedented time of social activism amid economic crisis, when voices everywhere are rising up for change, Maharidge's journey channels the spirits of George Orwell and James Agee, raising questions about class, privilege, and the very concept of "upward mobility," while serving as a final call to action. From Sacramento to Denver, Youngstown to New York City, Fucked At Birth dares readers to see themselves in those suffering most, and to finally-after decades of refusal-recalibrate what we are going to do about it.

This, the first title in a new series, Nature Retreats, which presents the most beautifully-designed holiday homes, with stunning mountain views. Travel journalist Sebastiaan Bedaux gathered 30 of the most stylish hideouts in the world in Mountain View. Despite the great variety of styles, different price tags and unique geography of the houses, they do have one thing in common: they are the stuff of dreams. The series will celebrate architecturally elegant hidden gems, surrounded by nature - deep in the woods, high up in the mountains, or built by the water - and all available for rent! Find some peace and quiet and let the splendour of the building and the unique landscape around it inspire you.