For more than 50 years David Bristow has been jaunting around southern Africa collecting curious wilderness anecdotes and historical nuggets from chats around the fireside as well as the rare books sections of the region’s foremost libraries. His singular obsession with the region’s remarkable people, creatures and places has culminated in a treasure trove of travel writing that plucks a motley crew of fascinating individuals from relative obscurity, connects the dots between past and present, and renews our appreciation for our natural heritage.

Loony Birds, Lion Men and the Snake That Was a Gerbil draws from Bristow’s Stories from the Veld collection to bring readers the ultimate compilation of fascinating characters, extraordinary insights and action-packed bush tales of derring-do. Meet a 5-feet-tall, gender-bending doctor prone to gun duels and a Khoi chief who escaped Robben Island multiple times.

Venture to Mapungubwe, South Africa’s very own El Dorado, learn how the Sabi Reserve’s first game ranger fought off two lions with the help of his trusty hound and get ready to be astonished.

Samestellers Corlia Fourie en Annelize van Rooyen bring vermaaklike reisstories deur 46 skrywers byeen, o.a. Marita van der Vyver, Kirby van der Merwe, Sophia Kapp, Jacques Pauw, Irma Joubert, Julian Jansen, C. Johan Bakkes, Bettina Wyngaard en Frederik de Jager.

Die skrywers vertel van verrassende gebeure tydens reise, met snaakse, bittersoet of heuglike gevolge. Maar altyd is die ervaringe verrykend.

Reis saam van Fraserburg tot Timboektoe; Arizona tot Zanzibar; en nog baie ander plekke!

Run for the Love of Life is a must-read for anyone who desires to escape the day-to-day sameness of our new pandemic-informed lives, or who seeks to feel alive, inspired, and filled with a renewed enthusiasm for the year ahead.

It recounts the extraordinary journey of South African Erica Terblanche, an ordinary woman who manages to not only achieve – but excel – on the world stage of extreme distance-running in some of the most inhospitable and majestic landscapes across the planet. Raw, honest and infinitely human, this part-memoir, part-travel novel thunders through one exotic race location after the other, as the runners battle the elements and each other across the vastness of the Sahara, Atacama and Namib Deserts, the great Grand Canyon, Turkish Cappadocia and the Kalahari Desert, to name only a few.

But more than just a book on racing, what makes this novel infinitely compelling and rewarding is that in the echoes of Erica’s story, one begins to sense the pulse of one’s own potential and long-forgotten dreams. While you may laugh, cry, and forget to take a breath at times, it is inevitable that Run will spur you on to find your own bliss, that which is buried deep within your soul and body.

At its heart, Run for the love of life is a story about love, forgiveness, perseverance and growth, and about the important things in life that ultimately makes us happy. Told with wit, humour and vulnerability, it is a book that will stay with the reader long after the final page is turned.

A road trip to Namibia unfolds across these pages, but when? Yesterday, years ago, or never at all? Barbara Adair refuses to say, creating something between memoir and fever dream.

This is no ordinary travel narrative. Language shifts without warning: playful one moment, brutal the next. The text overflows with names of rivers, flowers, trees, places, and people, then suddenly confronts the cruel realities of history and contemporary life. Nothing stays still long enough for comfort.

Here is freedom captured in words: wind, mythology, politics, life and death all tumbling together. Questions emerge about technology, mechanics, the vacuous nature of our existence. The reader can never settle into complacency.

Mark Kannemeyer's eerie illustrations enhance or deliberately undermine the text, offering visual refuge from the relentless verbal energy.

Non-linear, indulgent, challenging: this book demonstrates how language can be bent into new shapes, how stories can become something more than mere storytelling. Fun, sad, and occasionally repellent. Often all at once.

"As I sat on the side of Hamnafield on Foula in the Shetland Islands, looking down at my 'enormous' 38-foot ferry stowed in its cradle on the quay in Ham Voe, over 1,000 feet below me, I reflected on a moderately successful career to date, and wondered how on Earth I had ended up driving what was, in effect, a floating dust cart" After 42 years at or connected with the sea, Jeremy Walker ended up on the Shetland Island of Foula commanding and running a small ferry to the mainland of Shetland. Throughout the course of his career, firstly as a seagoing deck officer with a large, but now defunct, British shipping company, then as a Hovercraft Commander for four years, returning to sea for a brief period as Master of two small coastal tankers and then for the majority of his career as a Pilot on the River Humber, he encountered many amusing situations. In this book he attempts to relate these stories and to illustrate the lighter side of what was a very difficult, responsible and, at times, incredibly stressful job. And little did he know that his career was far from over and new opportunities and challenges would take him on for a further 13 years to eventual retirement.

"As I sat on the side of Hamnafield on Foula in the Shetland Islands, looking down at my 'enormous' 38-foot ferry stowed in its cradle on the quay in Ham Voe, over 1,000 feet below me, I reflected on a moderately successful career to date, and wondered how on Earth I had ended up driving what was, in effect, a floating dust cart" After 42 years at or connected with the sea, Jeremy Walker ended up on the Shetland Island of Foula commanding and running a small ferry to the mainland of Shetland. Throughout the course of his career, firstly as a seagoing deck officer with a large, but now defunct, British shipping company, then as a Hovercraft Commander for four years, returning to sea for a brief period as Master of two small coastal tankers and then for the majority of his career as a Pilot on the River Humber, he encountered many amusing situations. In this book he attempts to relate these stories and to illustrate the lighter side of what was a very difficult, responsible and, at times, incredibly stressful job. And little did he know that his career was far from over and new opportunities and challenges would take him on for a further 13 years to eventual retirement.

The “Old Legs” mantra is Have Fun, Do Good and Do Epic on roads less travelled and this beautiful photographic memoir of their epic cycle in Zimbabwe not only shares the beauty of Zimbabwe, but amuses and entertains at the same time.

“Old Legs” a group of retired cyclists decided to raise awareness and funds for Zimbabwe’s beleaguered pensioners. So they cycled from Harare to Cape Town, from Harare to Kilimanjaro – and climbed it – and then in 2021 to the gorillas in Uganda. Sadly in 2020 due to the Corona virus regional travelled was impossible, so they cycled around the border of Zimbabwe.

This book records the fun, comradeship, hardships, the people along the way and the incredible diversity and beauty of Zimbabwe. Written and published by Eric de Jong, with wonderful photographs taken by Gary de Jong, this is a stunning coffee-table book that will bring back memories of places you knew, or places you dreamt of visiting. A book to treasure!

One November morning, Tom Jeffreys set off from Euston Station with a gnarled old walking stick in his hand and an overloaded rucksack. His aim was to walk the 119 miles from London to Birmingham along the proposed route of HS2. Needless to say, he failed. Over the course of ten days of walking, Jeffreys meets conservationists and museum directors, ery farmers and suicidal retirees. From a rapidly changing London, through interminable suburbia, and out into the English countryside, Jeffreys goes wild camping in Perivale, ees murderous horses in Oxfordshire, and gets lost in a land ll site in Buckinghamshire. Signal Failure weaves together poetry and politics, history, philosophy and personal observation to form an extended exploration of people and place, nature, society, and the future. In part, Signal Failure is the story of the author's multiple shortcomings - his inability to understand the city he lives in, to forge a meaningful relationship with his home-county hometown, to emulate those great nature writers he admires so much, to put up a tent or read a map.It is also a wide-ranging critique of humanity's most urgent failures: of capitalism, of community, of the city and the suburbs, of architecture and agriculture, of bureaucratic democracy, and, in the end, of our age-old failure to nd our place in the world we live in.

Anne Dixey - a former BBC journalist who is now a highly respected and well-known feature writer for national newspapers - went to Washington DC when her partner was made Washington correspondent for the Times. This book details her journey through the madness of America.

Was Britain's postwar rebuilding the height of mid-century chic or the concrete embodiment of crap towns? John Grindrod decided to find out how blitzed, slum-ridden and crumbling austerity Britain became, in a few short years, a space-age world of concrete, steel and glass. What he finds is a story of dazzling space-age optimism, ingenuity and helipads - so many helipads - tempered by protests, deadly collapses and scandals that shook the government.

With an introduction by novelist David Vann

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild examines the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man, who in 1992 walked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and whose SOS note and emaciated corpse were found four months later.

Internationally bestselling author and mountaineer Jon Krakauer explores the obsession which leads some people to discoverthe outer limits of self, leave civilization behind and seek enlightenment through solitude and contact with nature.

In 2007, Into the Wild was adapted as a critically acclaimed film, directed by Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart.

Amusing and informative, Hey Ranger! teaches as it entertains with tales of boat ramp misadventures, lost Afghani campers, encounters with wild animals, dumb crooks, and more. One chapter, "Tales from the Wild Side," brings together unusual incidents from National Park Service reports, and the concluding essay, "Don't Be a Victim of Your Vacation," advises visitors on how to avoid being a story on the evening news.

’n Stuk of 50 stories waarin Dana Snyman besin oor enigiets van fopnuus tot ’n 40ste skoolreünie. Hy vertel van sy kennismaking met Eugène Terre’Blanche en van die Bogosi-gesin wat by hom op Jacobsbaai gewoon het. Hy vertel hoe mense na mekaar probeer uitreik in die land. Hoe ons mekaar soek en nie altyd vind nie. Ten slotte vertel hy van sy verloofde se selfdood en hoe hy daarná byna al sy besittings weggee en die pad vat.

Alan Winnington traveled to Yunnan province and spent several months with the headhunting Wa and the slave-owning Norsu and Jingpaw. The first European to enter and leave this area alive, Winnington reported on the struggle of recently released slaves as they came to terms with their newfound freedom.