'Of all his generation's travellers, Jonathan Raban is the most sophisticated, writing with a subtle and imaginative brilliance.' Colin Thubron 'One of the most humane and visionary of all travel writers.' Jeremy Seal Into Jonathan Raban's familiar Earls Court neighbourhood after the 1970s oil boom came new visitors from the Arab world, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks. A people apart, little known, Raban wanted to get behind the myth and the rumour to discover the reality of their lives and world. His journey took him through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. What he discovered was a far cry from the camel, tent and sand dune archetypes of early European explorers. Oil wealth had seeped into almost every corner, and Bedouin encampments had been replaced by cosmopolitan boomtowns, camels by Range Rovers. The sons of Bedouin nomads were now studying medicine in Europe and engineering in New York. Yet in this fast-moving world, old certainties remained - and cultural innovation lagged miles behind economic change. Raban's gift for friendship introduces us to a series of memorable individuals - rich and poor - set against the feel, the smells, the sounds and the nuances of Arabia.

8000 miles from home

1085 calories a day

3 months to write the novel that would make her name

At least that was the plan. But when Nell Stevens travelled to Bleaker Island in the Falklands (official population: two) she didn’t count on the isolation getting to her . . .

Hilarious and heartbreaking, this is a book about loneliness and creativity. It is about discovering who you are when there’s no one else around. And it’s about what to do when a plan doesn’t work: ultimately Nell may have failed to write a novel, but she succeeded in becoming a writer.

'A soaring gift of a book' Owen Sheers 'Remarkable' Mark Vanhoenacker, author of Skyfaring 'Stunning . . . a love letter to nature' Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love The day she flew in a glider for the first time, Rebecca Loncraine fell in love. Months of gruelling treatment for breast cancer meant she had lost touch with the world around her, but in that engineless plane, soaring 3,000 feet over the landscape of her childhood, with only the rising thermals to take her higher and the birds to lead the way, she felt ready to face life again. And so Rebecca flew, travelling from her home in the Black Mountains of Wales to New Zealand's Southern Alps and the Nepalese Himalayas as she chased her new-found passion: her need to soar with the birds, to push herself to the boundary of her own fear. Taking in the history of unpowered flight, and with extraordinary descriptions of flying in some of the world's most dangerous and dramatic locations, Skybound is a nature memoir with a unique perspective; it is about the land we know and the sky we know so little of, it is about memory and self-discovery. Rebecca became ill again just as she was finishing Skybound, and she died in September 2016. Though her death is tragic, it does not change what Skybound is: a book full of hope. Deeply moving, thrilling and euphoric, Skybound is for anyone who has ever looked up and longed to take flight. Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award 2018.

Join Joe Mack on his journey through ten countries as Europeans and fellow Americans talk about the events of 1968 that are worth remembering and sharing.

'Letters from the Atlantic' is an amusing and sometimes shocking reflection of life for those who are tempted by sunshine and a lower cost of living to live and work abroad. Barrie's temptation for a life in the sun led to many pitfalls and disasters, as well as learning more about his fellow 'ex-pats' and the Spanish people and their culture. The book recounts his adventures from leaving the UK in a series of letters. These letters are intended to be an inspiration for those tempted by a life in the sun, as well as some cautionary advice based on Barrie's real life experiences in Spain and the Canary Islands. This is not a travel book, but a well-observed view on people, society and the culture of living in another country. Barrie's work as a reporter and editor of an English language newspaper in Spain led him to meet a wide range of people, some amazing and some weird, but most who had stories and experiences to share with others. This book reflects how communities living abroad support each other especially when they live in nationalist enclaves. "A little piece of Britain" mentality exposes some wonderfully positive aspects of life abroad, as well as some disturbing issues that made Barrie feel sometimes embarrassed to be British. 'Letters from the Atlantic' offers an amusing and reflective view of living abroad for foreigners living in a country with a different language, a different culture, different legal systems and more importantly, a different pace of life. The frustrations of those from Britain and Ireland, as well as those from other north European countries can often lead to great unhappiness and disappointment of dreams spoiled or unfulfilled. This book sets out clearly the 'dos' and 'don'ts' for those who are contemplating moving abroad, as well as for those who have already made their choice for a life in the sun. The advice and suggestions are meant to encourage and support, as well as to entertain and amuse.

One grey dismal day, Janine Marsh was on a trip to northern France to pick up some cheap wine. She returned to England a few hours later having put in an offer on a rundown old barn in the rural Seven Valleys area of Pas de Calais. This was not something she'd expected or planned for. Janine eventually gave up her job in London to move with her husband to live the good life in France. Or so she hoped. While getting to grips with the locals and la vie Francaise, and renovating her dilapidated new house, a building lacking the comforts of mains drainage, heating or proper rooms, and with little money and less of a clue, she started to realize there was lot more to her new home than she could ever have imagined. These are the true tales of Janine's rollercoaster ride through a different culture - one that, to a Brit from the city, was in turns surprising, charming and not the least bit baffling.

A personalized travelogue, My World chronicles the inspiring story of a poor Kentucky boy who learned how to turn the rough grist of his life into the fine art of literature.

Jesse Stuart's life centered on W-Hollow, Greenup County, Kentucky, and extended to the far corners of the world. As a writer, teacher, and lecturer, he traveled to all but one of the United States and to ninety countries on six continents. As the core of Stuart's world, W-Hollow was the place of his birth and his first reaching out -- to the brown earth and the green shoots growing out of it, to the insects and animals that inhabited its wooded slopes, to the blue sky and the birds that flashed across it. From W-Hollow he went out first to Greenup High School, then to Lincoln Memorial University, then to all of Kentucky, and finally to the world.

In My World, we see Stuart's expanding universe through his eyes. Through the telescoping essays, Stuart slowly extends his vision to encompass more of the world and humanity. He is conscious of the social and geographical forces that shaped and defined his life. He is also very aware of the forces that draw him home again. He saw his beloved Kentucky as many states in one. Each region -- from the east Kentucky mountains to the Jackson Purchase -- was a unique kingdom. Stuart brings Kentucky's varied scenery, its people, and their distinctive dialects and social customs to life for his readers.

Seven years after her mother's death, Leonie Charlton is still gripped by memories of their fraught relationship. In May 2017, Leonie trekked through the Outer Hebrides in the company of a friend and their Highland Ponies in search of closure. When Leonie's pony has a serious accident, she begins to realise that finding peace with her mother is less important than letting go. Leonie Charlton blends travel and nature writing with intimate memoir in this beautifully written account of grief and acceptance.

Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 'A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carre In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were - for most Brits and Americans - part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000 nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As Europe sleepwalks into a perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists - both within and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists - have made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989 and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European dream.

After spending three decades advising multinational companies on geopolitics and security crises, Richard Fenning knows all about danger and intrigue. Kidnappings, terrorist attacks, coups d'etat, corruption scandals, cyber attacks, earthquakes and hurricanes were all in a day's work in a career that coincided with the rise of China, the tumult of the Middle East wars, the resurgence of populism and the digital revolution. Amid chaos and upheaval, he also found humanity and humour. Often witty and always insightful, What on Earth Can Go Wrong takes us from the battlefields of Iraq to the back streets of Bogota, from the steamy Niger Delta to the chill of Putin's Moscow. In a remarkable memoir of a life on the frazzled edge of globalisation, Fenning looks back with humanity and insight on the people and places he got to know, while offering some timely thoughts on the relationship between risk and fear in a profoundly volatile world.

The rip-roaring and hilarious memoir from Stanley Johnson--the father of London mayor Boris Johnson--begins with a loud bang when Stanley's father, an RAF pilot in World War II, crash-lands a Wellington bomber on a Devon airfield. A few years later Stanley's parents buy a sheep farm on nearby Exmoor, where Stanley does much of his growing up. Stanley would keep his links with this much-loved rural idyll throughout his life--while going on to become an explorer, author, occasional politician, and also one of the world's first environmentalists. A sparkling raconteur and experienced thriller writer, Stanley tells great stories in great style. On leaving school in 1958 Stanley traveled alone through South America--hitching rides across the jungle on Brazilian Air Force planes--and shortly afterwards he rode a motorcycle 4,000 miles from London to Afghanistan, tracing the route of Marco Polo with two friends. After winning Oxford University's poetry prize with a love poem--written following a hilltop tryst in the West Country--Stanley went on to do various adventurous jobs, before working for the billionaire John D. Rockefeller III, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the European Union. Stanley married and started a family young--Boris was born in New York when his father was 23--and while Boris would go on to become big news, the family's forbears also provide quite a story, as Stanley finds out. For the Johnson family's roots are not just in the West Country, but in Turkey too--where, as Stanley discovers, his politician grandfather Ali Kemal was torn to pieces by an angry mob. Stanley visits a Turkish village where the locals are blonde--later he learns that he and Boris are direct descendants of George II.

"Erika Fatland [is] shaping up to be one of the Nordics' most exciting new travel writers" National Geographic **SHORTLISTED FOR THE STANFORDS DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020** "A hauntingly lyrical meditation to the contingencies of history" Wall Street Journal "[An] impressive mix of history, reportage and travel memoir" Washington Post The Border is a book about Russia and Russian history without its author ever entering Russia itself; a book about being the neighbour of that mighty, expanding empire throughout history. It is a chronicle of the colourful, exciting, tragic and often unbelievable histories of these bordering nations, their cultures, their people, their landscapes. Through her last three documentary books - one about terrorism in Beslan, one about the 2011 terror attacks in Norway and one about post-Soviet Central Asia - social anthropologist Erika Fatland has established herself as a sharp observer and an outstanding interviewer at the forefront of Nordic non-fiction. Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? With engaging wit and surprising insights, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.

Holloway - a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock. In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin - author of Wildwood - travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres & great strangeness. Six years later, after Roger Deakin's early death, Robert Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The book is about those journeys and that landscape. Moving in the spaces between social history, psychogeography and travel writing, Holloway is a beautiful and haunted work of art.

This is a year of Sicilian life, its seasons and its sacred festivals, its gorgeous fruits and demanding family life, its casual assassinations and village feasts, its weather and the neighbours. It chronicles a life divided between an apartment in the city of Palermo with the weekends and summer devoted to sustaining life in an old family farm. What makes this journal truly exceptional is that Mary Simeti is both an outsider, (an American who had studied medieval history and worked as a volunteer on a social welfare programme) and an insider. For this journal was written after twenty years of immersion in Sicilian life, as wife to a Sicilian, mother to two Sicilian teenagers, as gardener, cook and carer for a suspicious mother-in- law.

Before he ascended to the highest office in the land as the United States youngest president, Theodore Roosevelt, with illustrations by Frederic Remington, though a New York City man born and bred, was a devotee of the Old West. In 1888, he published this charming ode to the American frontier, from the rewarding hard work of a rancher on the open plains to the pleasures of hunting the big game of mountains high. Today, the inimitable prose and infectious enthusiasm of Roosevelts writing here serves as much to limn a unique aspect of the character of the nation as it sings an elegy for a disappearing way of life. Includes numerous illustrations by Frederic Remington. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Roosevelts Letters to His Children, A Book-Lovers Holidays in the Open, America and the World War, Through the Brazilian Wilderness and Papers on Natural History, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, and Historic Towns: New York Politician and soldier, naturalist and historian, American icon THEODORE ROOSEVELT, (18581919) was 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909, and the first American to win a Nobel Prize, in 1906, when he was awarded the Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. He is the author of 35 books.

Taking us on a journey through the history of sacred art and architecture, Sacred Sites explores the myriads of ways in which we imbue our environments with profound and enduring meaning.  From our early designation of nature and the body as temple to our futuristic embrace of imaginary realms, we travel the vast and mystical landscapes of myth, religion, and imagination. 
 
Through gathering, we ignite our spaces with spirit, we circle the bonfire, bow down at the forest altar, give praise at the temple to our chosen divinities.  Through pilgrimage, we carve indelible pathways, making our meditative way across continents, generations of footsteps treading, again and again, upon sacred grounds. And through our creative offerings to spirit - we envision new worlds, wildly imaginative odes to what we deem as holy; golden temples hewn of rock, enormous spirals sculpted from sand and soil, silent sanctuaries hidden among wooded groves. We paint the ancient cave walls, carve petroglyphs to mark the way, place roses in veneration at the candlelit shrine. 
 
Slowly, stone-by-stone, we build monuments to our gods, a cosmic geometry held within our sacred architecture of worship. These hidden patterns can be found in the mysterious, towering pyramids found across the globe and throughout an astounding diversity of cultures, in the marble sanctuaries built to house the Greek and Roman goddesses, and in the windblown mountain monasteries of ancient Asia and the indigenous cliff-dwellings of the American Southwest.
 
Nature, art, beauty, these are the common elements found both within the places made sacred by our ancestors and in the multitude of environments where we strive to connect to source, and to ourselves.  Tracing a hallowed route from rugged stone temples to transcendent works of modern architecture, the fifth volume in The Library of Esoterica celebrates the collective history of spaces made sacrosanct through human worship.

Tired of living a life based on other's expectations, Hannah Papp quit her job, bought a EuroRail ticket and a map, notified her landlady, and left town. Embarking on a journey across Europe with no plan and no direction, Hannah stumbled into becoming a modern-day Mystical Backpacker. Along the way her discoveries and the teachers she encountered allowed her to go on a deeper journey into the self and the spirit-revealing the real self she had long been missing. The Mystical Backpackershows you how to identify the signs along the road that will lead to teachers and experiences that will reorient your own life map. Ultimately, The Mystical Backpackeroffers a solution, a way to break free and find your inner self's rhythms and needs, fulfilling your true destiny. It's time you hit the road and become a mystical backpacker.

International bestseller now in new gift format!

A celebration of food, culture and place, here are 100 dishes from Tokyo, the gastronomic megacity.

If you want sushi, miso soup, gyoza, ramen, donburi, bento, tonkatsu, lotus root chips, mochi or a yuzu sorbet ... they're all here. Plus features on essential cooking techniques and key ingredients, making it truly Japanese food made simple.

Author Maori Murota grew up in Tokyo and was inspired to write this book by her mother's cooking and memories of cooking at home and eating out. Her mission is to demystify Japanese food, to make it accessible and understood by anyone and everyone interested in learning about a food culture and eating well.

If you want to know about writing, about how to make others share the horror and intensity of an experience, try the first piece in this collection, Justice at Night. Martha Gellhorn wrote it as a 28-year-old, having just returned home to the States after four years in Europe, in 1936. What follows is a selection of fifty years of peacetime journalism, history caught at the moment of its unfolding, as it looked and felt to those who experienced it. It's about revolutions in the making, guilty acts of state terrorism, poverty, injustice and recovery. It vividly captures the range and intensity of Gellhorn's courageous work and is also a passionate call to arms, not only to remember the wronged and to bear witness to evil, but to stand your ground in the face of it.

"Valse des Fleurs" recreates one glittering day in the life of St. Petersburg in its heyday. It summons up a lost generation of courtiers, servants, guards, officials and dignitaries otherwise swept to oblivion by the Russian Revolution. Though slim enough to read on the train from Moscow, "Valse des Fleurs" has a haunting and evocative power. It is the perfect introduction to the Imperial capital of the Tsars.