Dan Boothby had been drifting for more than twenty years, without the pontoons of family, friends or a steady occupation. He was looking for but never finding the perfect place to land. Finally, unexpectedly, an opportunity presented itself. After a lifelong obsession with Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water trilogy, Boothby was given the chance to move to Maxwell's former home, a tiny island on the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland. Island of Dreams is about Boothby's time living there, and about the natural and human history that surrounded him; it's about the people he meets and the stories they tell, and about his engagement with this remote landscape, including the otters that inhabit it. Interspersed with Boothby's own story is a quest to better understand the mysterious Gavin Maxwell. Beautifully written and frequently leavened with a dry wit, Island of Dreams is a charming celebration of the particularities of place.

This guide to collecting books on Japan, in English, is organized alphabetically and includes listings of major writers, together with historical and cultural notes. The work provides in an easy-to-use format, a list of obtainable books (both in print and out of print) which form the core of a serious collection. Additionally, the bibliographic listing, the biographic sketches of the more prominent authors, and cultural and historical commentaries should be useful to the researcher.

This guide to collecting books on Japan, in English, is organized alphabetically and includes listings of major writers, together with historical and cultural notes. The work provides in an easy-to-use format, a list of obtainable books (both in print and out of print) which form the core of a serious collection. Additionally, the bibliographic listing, the biographic sketches of the more prominent authors, and cultural and historical commentaries should be useful to the researcher.

'A hilarious book of bad times, bedtimes and benders. It is a kind of cool parody of On the Road.' New Statesman No Particular Place to Go (first published in 1981) relates Hugo Williams's journey across the USA on a three-month poetry-reading tour wherein he also hoped to discover some of the America he had imagined for so long on the strength of its all-consuming popular culture. 'No Particular Place to Go isn't a book that you'd take on a visitor's itinerary of the States . . . But the journey it describes is a potent one . . . It offered a poet's eye on modern culture, a cool, sideways perspective on its consumers and an enviable traveller's voice - not just unafraid of meeting the locals but positively keen to jump in and grab whatever was on offer.' John Walsh, Independent

Professor Augusto Gansser, who died in 2012 aged 101, was a Swiss geologist, researcher and adventurer whose explorations led to new insights about the origins of the great mountain ranges. Early on in his life this modest man began to document his work and life in words, sketches and photographs. His first diary dates back to 1929, the beginning of his career as a geologist. 80 years later, the stock of his diaries and field notebooks is impressive. They tell of the adventurous trip to Eastern Greenland in 1934 when his team of geologists got stranded on the pack-ice for several weeks. They speak of demanding excursions in the Himalayas - barely investigated in the mid-thirties; of his artistry at disguise when he entered Tibet, at the time still closed to foreigners, disguised as a monk to bring back valuable rock samples from the Kailas, the holiest mountain on planet earth. They speak of excursions to Columbia and Trinidad, and the discovery of giant oil deposits as geologist-in-chief under the Shah of Persia. They tell of the friendship with the Bhutanese King's family and their support in allowing him to be the first to map their country. And this book speaks of all these adventures. There is an immense wealth of photos, sketches and field reports in this lavish book. Ursula Markus accompanied her father Augusto Gansser on many trips. As editor she researched the immense image material for the book, and with the well-known journalist Ursula Eichenberger the eventful life of Gansser is described.

"'I believe I shall be writing home about this trip for the rest of my life... years from now, still recollecting, like an old white hunter, shadowy images to an empty fireplace, far into the night...'"

"All the Time in the World," a first work of prose by the poet Hugo Williams, was originally published in 1966 and commemorates Williams' effort at age 21 to 'travel the world': the Middle East, India, South-East Asia, Japan and Australia. Rich with striking and vivid perceptions of people and places and perilous forms of transport, the account also finds Williams acquiring precious life-experience, even as the setting moves from the self-evident 'poem' of India's landscape to barren, petrified Northern Australia. In Calcutta Williams looks up the great Satyajit Ray through the telephone book. In Thailand he meets a girl at a dance-hall, moves into her sunny flat, contemplates staying. But to England he will return, albeit by the most unexpectedly arduous leg of his amazing journey.

In these collected stories, Long explores watery, secluded jungle caves in South America, tackles remote thawing iceflows on Baffin Island, and solos cutting-edge rock climbs over a desert hungry for his failure.

Through the performance ritual, the audience vicariously experiences the freedom, cultural risks, and utopian possibilities that society has denied them. Audience members are encouraged to touch us, smell us, feed us, defy us. In this strange millenial ceremony, the pandora box opens and the post-colonial demons are unleashed. - Guillermo Gomez-Pena's Performance Diaries
Guillermo Gomez-Pena has been variously described as among the most significant of late-twentieth-century performance artists - The Village Voice; a peacemaker in the worlds culture clash - Vanity Fair; and a wizard of language - The Chicago Tribune. He is without doubt, a unique outsider-artist who crosses the border and talks back.
In Dangerous Bordercrossers, Gomez-Pena continues his epic, artistic journey through globalisation, the commodification of identity, and the continuing culture wars. His writings, like his performances, point towards a borderless future and a poetics of hybridity.
This latest anthology of his performance chronicles, diary entries, poems, essays, and texts, sheds an extraordinary light on the life and work of this migrant provocateur. He documents and illuminates his brilliantly inventive collaborations with Roberto Sifuentes and Sara Shelton-Mann, among others, and reveals, for the first time, what it's like to be a Chicano on the road.
Dangerous Bordercrossers is at once sexy, scary and inspiring. Be prepared to be provoked.

Winner: Mountain Literature (Non Fiction) The Jon Whyte Award, Banff Mountain Book Competition 2019 Waymaking is an anthology of prose, poetry and artwork by women who are inspired by wild places, adventure and landscape. Published in 1961, Gwen Moffat's Space Below My Feet tells the story of a woman who shirked the conventions of society and chose to live a life in the mountains. Some years later in 1977, Nan Shepherd published The Living Mountain, her prose bringing each contour of the Cairngorm mountains to life. These pioneering women set a precedent for a way of writing about wilderness that isn't about conquering landscapes, reaching higher, harder or faster, but instead about living and breathing alongside them, becoming part of a larger adventure. The artists in this inspired collection continue Gwen and Nan's legacies, redressing the balance of gender in outdoor adventure literature. Their creativity urges us to stop and engage our senses: the smell of rain-soaked heather, wind resonating through a col, the touch of cool rock against skin, and most importantly a taste of restoring mind, body and spirit to a former equanimity. With contributions from adventurers including Alpinist magazine editor Katie Ives, multi-award-winning author Bernadette McDonald, adventurers Sarah Outen and Anna McNuff, renowned filmmaker Jen Randall and many more, Waymaking is an inspiring and pivotal work published in an era when wilderness conservation and gender equality are at the fore.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Edward Stanford Award 'My goodness, it is brilliant. Searingly honest, warm, bursting with humanity. Such brave and inspiring writing.' Kate Humble '[Simon] begins to fill in the gaps in his life story that until recently he has never publicly revealed.' Telegraph PRAISE FOR SIMON REEVE 'TV's most interesting globetrotter' Independent 'The craziest (or bravest) man on TV' Mail on Sunday 'Like all the best travellers, Reeve carries out his investigations with infectious relish, and in the realisation that trying to understand the country you're in is not just fascinating, but also hugely enjoyable' Daily Telegraph 'Simon might just be the best tour guide in the world' The Sun * * * * * * * * * In TV adventurer Simon Reeve's bestselling memoir he describes how he has journeyed across epic landscapes, dodged bullets on frontlines, walked through minefields and been detained for spying by the KGB. His travels have taken him across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world. In this revelatory account of his life Simon gives the full story behind some of his favourite expeditions, and traces his own inspiring personal journey back to leaving school without qualifications, teetering on a bridge, and then overcoming his challenges by climbing to a 'Lost Valley' and changing his life ... step by step.

WINNER: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER READER AWARD FOR BEST TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 WINNER: BOOKS ARE MY BAG READER AWARD FOR BEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR BIOGRAPHY 2016 Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island that had become his adopted country. The hilarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, was taken to the nation's heart and became the bestselling travel book ever, and was also voted in a BBC poll the book that best represents Britain.Now, to mark the twentieth anniversary of that modern classic, Bryson makes a brand-new journey round Britain to see what has changed. Following (but not too closely) a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, by way of places that many people never get to at all, Bryson sets out to rediscover the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly unique country that he thought he knew but doesn't altogether recognize any more. Yet, despite Britain's occasional failings and more or less eternal bewilderments, Bill Bryson is still pleased to call our rainy island home. And not just because of the cream teas, a noble history, and an extra day off at Christmas. Once again, with his matchless homing instinct for the funniest and quirkiest, his unerring eye for the idiotic, the endearing, the ridiculous and the scandalous, Bryson gives us an acute and perceptive insight into all that is best and worst about Britain today.

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.

By the time Benacerraf received a Nobel prize in 1980 for his discovery of immune response genes, he had travelled a long way - literally on the road to success. He was born in Venezuela in 1920 to Sephardic Jewish parents from Algeria and Morocco. Benacerraf's childhood was spent primarily in Paris, until fear of war with Nazi Germany compelled his family to flee to Venezuela in 1939. Persuading his parents to send him to New York that same year, Benacerraf attended Columbia University, beginning a peripatetic existence that lasted until he landed in Boston in 1969, where he has held prominent positions at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. In the meantime, his passion for medical research gained him numerous prestigious appointments and awards. In addition to chronicling developments in his personal life, Benacerraf offers up rather dry accounts of his most important research projects - as well as his prediction for advances in cancer treatment and his somewhat crotchety opinions on the state of science education today and the research grant business. Despite colourful early years and his impressive accomplishments, Benacerraf paints his life in a two-dimensional fashion and presents insights without enough imagination to sustain the average reader's interest for long.

In this inspiring and original book, former editor of The Times, Sir Peter Stothard, re-traces the journey taken by Spartacus and his army of rebels. In the final century of the first Roman Republic an army of slaves brought a peculiar terror to the people of Italy. Its leaders were gladiators. Its purpose was incomprehensible. Its success was unprecedented. The Spartacus Road is the route along which this rebel army outfought the Roman legions between 73 and 71 BC, bringing both fears and hopes that have never wholly left the modern mind. It is a road that stretches through 2,000 miles of Italian countryside and out into 2,000 years of world history. In this inspiring and original memoir, the former editor of The Times, Peter Stothard, takes us on an extraordinary journey. The result is a book like none other - at once a journalist's notebook, a classicist's celebration, a survivor's record of a near fatal cancer and the history of a unique and brutal war. As he travels along the Spartacus road - through the ruins of Capua to Vesuvius and the lost Greek cities of the Italian south - Stothard's prose illuminates conflicting memories of times ancient and modern, the simultaneously foreign and familiar, one of the greatest stories of all ages. Sweepingly erudite and strikingly personal, On the Spartacus Road is non-fiction writing of the highest order.

'Eric Newby still holds the laurels as the country's wittiest travel writer . . . "A Merry Dance Around the World" is a collection of all the master's best traveller's tales extracted from a lifetime's travel writing. It is an astonishing catalogue of disasters and misunderstandings, but it had me laughing so uncontrollably my wife eventually forbade me from reading it in public' "Sunday Times"

'In the increasingly populous realm of travel writing, Eric Newby has acquired Homeric status . . . The extract from "Love and War in the Apennines," arguably one of the best travel books ever written, shows Eric Newby at his most scintillating, and the chapter from "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" includes the most luminous moment in modern travelling history' "Daily Telegraph"

'Whatever Eric Newby writes I read with uncritical pleasure. The Newby travels are classics of their time' "Financial Times"

'Keeping up with Eric Newby, every breathless puff and pant of it, is worth it all the way. His vitality, which was always more than most people's, gets bigger and his writing richer and funnier' " Observer"

'Newby is an incomparable, shrewd and witty travel writer . . . Immensely enjoyable' John Mortimer, "Mail on Sunday"

'Newby has quite rightly established himself as one of the sharpest, funniest and most boisterously entertaining of all travel writers' " Sunday Telegraph"

In Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely. Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall's secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects - feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny - as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out 'thin places' where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin. 'It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn't just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist 'busyness', to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out 'the everyday divine'. It has sent me out looking for 'thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.' Beautiful and essential.' - Helen Mort

'Whatever else we remember of our travels, we remember our departures and arrivals. Often they are the most enduring of all our memories of them.' From one of Britain's best-loved travel writers comes a fascinating collection of incredible highlights from an eventful life. Acutely observant, with an eye for quirky detail and a wit of charming self-deprecation, Eric Newby has delighted readers with his travels, whether to remote locations or his very own back garden. In this captivating collection of 19 tales, Newby invites the reader to join him as he navigates the globe, from the shops and streets of the pram-vantaged Barnes of yesteryear to a mysterious opal-mining town in Australia, and from the faded glamour of the Orient Express to a cycle ride along the Meridian Line, navigating rivers and ill-placed homes. As a forefather of the modern comic travel book, Newby's insatiable curiosity and infectious enthusiasm have garnered him an incredible following over many decades. 'Departures and Arrivals' is a superb showcase of Eric Newby's distinctive storytelling and boundless energy that will delight both existing fans and new admirers.

In Climbing Days, Dan Richards is on the trail of his great-great-aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a prominent and pioneering mountaineer of the early twentieth century. For years, Dorothy and her husband, I. A. Richards, remained a mystery to Dan, but the chance discovery of her 1935 memoir leads him on a journey. Perhaps, in the mountains, he can meet them halfway? Climbing Days is a beautiful portrait of a trailblazing woman, previously lost to history, but also a book about that eternal question: why do people climb mountains?

The incredible memoir by international bestselling author of Where The Crawdad's Sing, Delia Owens and her partner Mark Owens', charting their time researching wildlife in the Kalahari Desert. Reissued and in full colour, for the first time since its original publication in 1984.

Carrying little more than a change of clothes and a pair of binoculars, two young Americans, Mark and Delia Owens, caught a plane to Africa, bought a third-hand Land Rover, and drove deep into the Kalahari Desert. There they lived for seven years, in an unexplored area with no roads, no people, and no source of water for thousands of square miles. In this vast wilderness the Owenses began their zoology research, working along animals that had never before been exposed to humans.

An international bestseller on original release, Cry of the Kalahari is the story of the Owenses's life with lions, brown hyenas, jackals, giraffes, and the many other creatures they came to know. It is also a gripping account of how they survived the dangers of living in one of the last and largest pristine areas on Earth.

'It was rugged travel; the hotels where we stayed were basic and often dirty. We lived on bread, cheese, figs, pastis and wine. The bus journeys were slow and suffocating, with long stops for no particular reason. One day we would be languishing in the humid heat of an estuary, the next exhilarated by sweet mountain air, waking to forests and mountains. We never saw an English person, and hardly any French, except at Calvi and Ile-Rousse towards the end of our trip.'

That is Alan Ross describing Corsica in 1947 which he and the artist John Minton visited, in the footsteps of Edward Lear, expressly to write this book. Although admitting, perhaps too modestly, to the influence of Graham Greene's "The Lawless Roads" and" Journey Without Maps" and therefore 'too inclined to see Corsica in terms of defeated priests, corrupt politicians and saintly monks' he wrote one of the best travel books since the Second World War. It is, in fact, a collaboration between a gifted writer and the most romantic artist of his generation, and, in its own lesser way, it played a part, alongside the early Elizabeth Davids (also illustrated by John Minton), of reminding drab, grey, post-war Britain of a warmer, sunnier, more colourful alternative: the Mediterranean.

'Evocative and splendid . . . alert, fresh and sensuous' "Times Literary Supplement"

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'Poetic, personal, the pungent effect of travel on keen senses' V. S. Pritchett, "New Statesman"

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'Splashed with bold strokes and burning colours . . . We are made to see and small, hear and feel the place. That is the test of a good travel book' "Observer "

'Roger Deakin is the perfect companion for an invigorating armchair swim. Engaging, thoughtful and candid' Telegraph Waterlog celebrates the magic of water and the beauty and eccentricity of Britain. In 1996 Roger Deakin, the late, great nature writer, set out to swim through the British Isles. From the sea, from rock pools, from rivers and streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools and spas, from fens, dykes, moats, aqueducts, waterfalls, flooded quarries, even canals, Deakin gains a fascinating perspective on modern Britain. Detained by water bailiffs in Winchester, intercepted in the Fowey estuary by coastguards, mistaken for a suicide on Camber sands, confronting the Corryvreckan whirlpool in the Hebrides, he discovers just how much of an outsider the native swimmer is to his landlocked, fully-dressed fellow citizens. This is a personal journey, a bold assertion of the native swimmer's right to roam, and an unforgettable celebration of the magic of water.

Thirty hand-picked tattoo shops and the work of over one hundred artists are included in this book showcasing the blossoming body art communities in New Mexico and Arizona. Displayed are over 600 color photos of tattoo artistry. Trendsetting artists create a wide range of tattoo art in motifs as diverse as the men and women who receive and appreciate them. The artwork ranges from the small to the large. Classic black and white artistry and modern full color work are featured. Themes captured include natural scenes, animals and birds, flowers, nautical scenes and symbols, Oriental motifs from dragons to geishas, portraits of loved ones, religious art, Day of the Dead motifs, occult symbology, and much more. The artists and their shops are also featured. For anyone with an appreciation of tattoo artistry, this book is for you.

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.

'Like London, like Paris or New York or pre-war Alexandria, Bombay contains not just many different social worlds but whole solar systems of different societies moving separately and intricately over the same territory. Ever since its insignificant and hesitant beginnings it has acted as a draw for people of so many races and languages, Indian, Middle Eastern and European, that there is no one tongue in general use there. For a while the largest city east of Suez till you came to Tokyo, and the largest in the British Empire after London, Bombay has always just missed being a world capital.'

This is Gillian Tindall's own description. Bombay (Mumbai) is indeed one of the great cities of the world and this book, first published in 1982, does full justice to it.

'Fascinating. Gillian Tindall has brought the great city richly to life. It is a keenly perceptive account - at once loving and stringent.' Colin Thubron.

'A glowing evocation of a great exotic subject . . . A celebration of the city' John Carey, "Sunday Times"

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'Her feeling for the past is not tinged with curry or sentimentality . . . her perceptions, visual and historical, are acute . . . a good an unusual choice as Bombay's biographer' "Observer"

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'Insatiably curious, novelist and historian, Gillian Tindall does not rest until she gets tot he origins of whatever interests her. Here she has focused on architecture and the British roots of the metropolis. She has accomplished the job admirably' - "New Statesman"