'Forget routine; now is the time to embrace the unknown, step out of your comfort zone and open the gateway to the Art of Exploration.' 'Britain's best loved adventurer' (The Times) talks about his secrets of discovery for the first time in this revealing manual of what it means to be an explorer in the modern age. The man who has walked the Nile, the Himalayas and the Americas discusses his lessons from a life on the road, how he managed to turn a passion into a lifestyle, and what inspired and motivated him along the way. Wood explains how he and other explorers face up to life's challenges, often in extraordinary circumstances and demonstrate resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. He shares examples of pioneers in many fields, using their work to show how we can all develop our own explorers mindset and how these lessons can be applied in daily life. With chapters on curiosity, teamwork, resilience and positivity this is a book that provides a tool kit - no matter your age or profession. As Levison says, 'these lessons can help you to fulfil your potential for living a happy life, regardless of your circumstances'.

'Fowler's moving memoir charts her experience of coming out as a gay woman, alongside her journey through Birmingham's canal networks, mapping both the waterways and the travails of her heart.' Observer 'An emotional and compelling memoir, that left me inspired, both by her bravery in transforming her life, and by the unexpected beauty she finds along the way' Countryfile Magazine 'Fowler beautifully exposes her emotional fragility while also celebrating the unloved nature of buddleia, herons and even the water rats who take refuge among the locks.' i paper 'Fowler captures the beauty of the canal's dishevelled, neglected condition...' Times Literary Supplement 'Thoughtful and heartbreakingly honest ...Beautiful' Press Association 'An astounding memoir' Gay Star News 'Hidden Nature is one of the most thrilling things I've read in a long time' Waterways World 'She writes wonderfully about the species that have carved out a place for themselves amid the discarded shopping trolleys, condom packets and industrial waste' Guardian 'This candid book is as much about mapping the heart as it is about mapping the paths of waterways. Lovely.' Simple Things 'A beautiful memoir' Good Housekeeping 'Gentle, brave and acutely observant' Woman's Weekly Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, the Guardian's award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care? Beautifully written, honest and very moving, Hidden Nature is also the story of Alys Fowler's emotional journey and her coming out as a gay woman: above all, this book is about losing and finding, exploring familiar places and discovering unknown horizons.

A Walking tour through the haunted landscapes of the past, in the company of the exiled and the departed.The Rings of Saturn begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia. From Lowestoft to Southwold to Bungay, Sebald's own story becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present: of Chateau briand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. The result is a book unlike any other in contemporary literature, an intricately patterned and endlessly thought-provoking meditation on the transience of all things human.

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.

Twelve-year-old Hans Thomas lives alone with his father, a man who likes to give his son lessons about life and has a penchant for philosophy. Hans Thomas' mother left when he was four (to 'find' herself) and the story begins when father and son set off on a trip to Greece, where she now lives, to try to persuade her to come home. En route, in Switzerland, Hans Thomas is given a magnifying glass by a dwarf at a petrol station, and the next day he finds a tiny book in his bread roll which can only be read with a magnifying glass. How did the book come to be there? Why does the dwarf keep showing up? It is all very perplexing and Hans Thomas has enough to cope with, with the daunting prospect of seeing his mother. Now his journey has turned into an encounter with the unfathomable...or does it all have a logical explanation?

In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together.

Her journey would take her from Myanmar's tropical south to the embattled mountain towns that border India and China. In dilapidated carriages, along tracks in disrepair, through contested ethnic states and former sites of forced labour, visiting temples, tea shops and festivals, Clare encountered a colourful and contradictory Myanmar through the stories of its people. Simultaneously a lush and evocative travelogue, an unsparing account of Myanmar's recent history, and an astonishing, conversation-shifting engagement with Britain's colonial legacy, On the Shadow Tracks is that rare and necessary thing: a book that finds and tells the truth.

In "The Waiting Land" (first published in 1967) Dervla Murphy affectionately portrays the people of Nepal's different tribes, the customs of an ancient, complex civilization and the country's natural grandeur and beauty. This is the third of Dervla Murphy's early travel books: an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman. Yet it can also be seen as the completion of a trilogy of books concerned with her experience of self- sufficient mountain cultures, first tasted in crossing Persia and Afghanistan in "Full Tilt", and deepened with her experience of working with Tibetan refugees in the frontiers of Northern India, as told in "Tibetan Foothold". Having settled in a village in the Pokhara Valley to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, she makes her home in a tiny, vermin-infested room over a stall in the bazaar. In diary form, she describes her various journeys by air, by bicycle and on foot into the remote and mountainous Lantang region on the border of Tibet. Murphy's charm and sensitivity as a writer and traveller reveal not only the vitality of an age-old civilization facing the challenge of Westernisation, but the wonder and excitement of her own remarkable adventures.

"The beauty of good writing is that it transports the reader inside another person's experience in some other physical place and culture," writes Padma Lakshmi in her introduction, "and, at its best, evokes a palpable feeling of being in a specific moment in time and space." The essays in this year's Best American Travel Writing are an antidote to the isolation of the year 2020, giving us views into experiences unlike our own and taking us on journeys we could not take ourselves. From the lively music of West Africa, to the rich culinary traditions of Muslims in Northwest China, to the thrill of a hunt in Alaska, this collection is a treasure trove of diverse places and cultures, providing the comfort, excitement, and joy of feeling elsewhere. THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2021 INCLUDES KIESE MAKEBA LAYMON - LESLIE JAMISON - BILL BUFORD - JON LEE ANDERSON - MEGHAN DAUM LIGAYA MISHAN - PAUL THEROUX and others

This new book of essays from the author of Wild tracks the turning light of the day and seasons, an almanac of the turning times. Beginning in night and winter, it moves to dawn and spring, then noon and summer and finally evening and autumn. Set partly at the author's home in Wales, the book journeys widely, searching for a dead father in Prague, listening to the Sky-Grandmothers of Mexican myth and staying with the people of West Papua who, when they know they will fall over laughing, lie down first. It asks: what is the real gift of the misunderstood Goddess Nemesis? Why should flowers be prescribed as medicine? What do male zebra finches dream of? Where do the sands of time run fastest, and how is that connected to the age of anxiety? It explores the dawn chorus; the tradition of sacred hospitality; dust from the time before the sun even existed; the twilight time of the trickster and the daily rituals of morning. In all of these it asks: why does light, through the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, affect us? Griffiths concludes this extraordinary collection by deciding that light is in fact how we think.

Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2020 'A thought-provoking treatise interwoven with blistered-feet-on-the-ground accounts of spots both pretty and gritty' National Geographic 'Compelling, thought-provoking, and courageous, this epic-poetic journey peels back layers of collective emotional and imaginative inheritance. Jubber gets under the skin of our complicated continent and his timing is dead right' Kapka Kassabova 'A genuine epic' Wanderlust 'The prose is colourful and vigorous...Jubber's journeying has indeed been epic, in scale and ambition. In this thoughtful travelogue he has woven together colourful ancient and modern threads into a European tapestry that combines the sombre and the sparkling' Spectator 'Epic Continent sets out on a physical and mythological journey to uncover what it means to be European' Geographical These are the stories that made Europe. Reaching back into the ancient and medieval eras in which these defining works were produced, and investigating their continuing influence today, Epic Continent explores how matters of honour, fundamentalism, fate, nationhood, sex, class and politics have preoccupied the people of Europe across the millennia. In these tales soaked in blood and fire, Nicholas Jubber discovers how the world of gods and emperors, dragons and water maidens, knights and princesses made our own: their deep impact on European identity, and their resonance in our turbulent times. Journeying from Turkey to Iceland, award-winning travel writer Nicholas Jubber takes us on a fascinating adventure through our continent's most enduring epic poems to learn how they were shaped by their times, and how they have since shaped us.

'An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.'

The celebrated American food writer M. F. K. Fisher pays tribute to that most delicate and enigmatic of foods: the oyster. She tells of oysters found in stews and soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared à la Rockefeller or au naturel and of the pearls sometimes found therein.

As she describes each dish, Fisher recalls her own initiation into the 'strange cold succulence' of raw oysters as a young woman in Marseille and Dijon, and explores both the bivalve's famed aphrodisiac properties and its equally notorious gut-wrenching powers.

Plumbing the 'dreadful but exciting' life of the oyster, Fisher invites readers to share in the comforts and delights that this delicate edible evokes, and enchants us along the way with her characteristically wise and witty prose.

William Alexander is not just a Francophile, he wants to be French. It's not enough to explore the country, to enjoy the food and revel in the ambiance, he wants to feel French from the inside. Among the things that stand in his way is the fact that he can't actually speak the language. Setting out to conquer the language he loves (but which, amusingly, does not seem to love him back), Alexander devotes himself to learning French, going beyond grammar lessons and memory techniques to delve into the history of the language, the science of linguistics, and the art of translation. Along the way, during his travels in France or following his passion at home, he discovers that not learning a language may be its own reward.

'A total joy' Laura Kay, author of The Split 'Hilarious and unexpectedly moving' Richard Roper, author of Something to Live For 'The perfect book for summer 2021' James Bailey, author of The Flip Side 'Brilliantly written, properly funny and poignant' Tom Ellen, author of All About Us 'A delightful and unique take on travel writing' Katy Wix, author of Delicacy The setting: Europe. A continent overrun by tourism, where tapas-crawlers cross paths with machine-gun-wielding cops, graffiti tour guides collide with anti-gentrification protestors and, in one classy mountain retreat, a bored patissier teaches mindful croissant-making to a bereaved luggage designer. Witness to this outlandish international spectacle is Mark, comically self-conscious and often thoroughly disturbed by modern life. In his 30s and working as a copywriter for an online travel company despite never having personally ventured further than France, Mark is determined to make up for lost time by embarking on the kind of freewheeling summer expedition he's always dreamed of. And even if his revered older cousin Paris is unable to join him on the trip, he's determined not to let that hold him back. Mark can always email the mysteriously absent Paris about the homes and experiences he has along the way, in intricate and often hilarious detail. Described by The Times as 'one of the finest comic minds of Generation Y', award-winning comedian Liam Williams brings his inimitable mix of humour and pathos to his unforgettable debut novel.

Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When at last he comes home to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo's south-eastern coast, he finds a country that in some ways has changed beyond recognition: the cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture has become a Pentecostal temple, and his secondary school has been re-named in honour of a previously despised colonial ruler. But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture which still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Mabanckou though, now a decorated French-Congolese writer and esteemed professor at UCLA, finds he can only look on as an outsider at the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to Congo, Mabanckou slowly builds a stirring exploration of the way home never leaves us, however long ago we left home.

In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of colonial history. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm.

To travel the Silk Road, the greatest land route on earth, is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, Colin Thubron covered some seven thousand miles in eight months--out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey--and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.

In 1897, two sisters embark from Pennsylvania in search of soul-broadening experiences in the Indian Southwest, newly opened to intrepid travellers. Their letters and photographs are the heart of this brilliantly reassembled grand tour.

The first of a set of 5 additions to the best selling Recollections series taking us on a nostalgic tour of Britain during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.Cedric Greenwood takes us on a photographic journey from Cornwall to Scotland with a wide selection of atmospheric shots taken during those three decades.Using the means of transport available including buses, trams, trains and ships we see the street scenes and life as it was back then.The fashions, the vehicles, the shops, the industries, the landscape and much, mich more frozen in the moment and captured by Cedric's camera for us to enjoy 40, 50, 60 years later!This first volume (No 70 in the Recollections series takes us to the centre of Britain covering Northamptonshire to Merseyside.

Not many Brits move to Poland to work in a fish and chip shop. Fewer still come back wanting to be a Member of the European Parliament.

Travel writer Ben Aitken moved to Poland in 2016 to understand why the Poles were leaving. He booked the cheapest flight he could find, to a place he had never heard of – Poznan. This candid, funny and offbeat book is the account of his year in Poland, as an unlikely immigrant.

Between peeling potatoes and boning fish, Ben spent time on the road travelling the country. He missed the bus to Auschwitz; stayed with a dozen nuns near Krakow; was offered a job by a Eurosceptic farmer and went to Gdansk to learn how Solidarity rose and communism fell. This is a bittersweet portrait of an unsung country, challenging stereotypes that Poland is a grey, ex-soviet land, and revealing a diverse country, rightfully proud of its colorful identity.

Beyond Belief is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues of our time. But it is not a book of opinion. It is, in the Naipaul way, a very rich and human book, full of people and their stories: stories of family, both broken and whole; of religion and nation; and of the constant struggle to create a world of virtue and prosperity in equal measure. Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith; and it can become a neurosis. What has this Arab Islam done to the histories of the non-Arab Islamic states: Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia? How do the converted peoples view their past - and their future? In a follow-up to Among the Believers, his classic account of his travels through these countries, V. S. Naipaul returns, after a gap of seventeen years, to find out how and what the converted preach. 'Peerless . . . the human encounters are described minutely, superbly, picking up inconsistencies in people's tales, catching the uncertainties and the nuances . . . there is a candour to his writing, a constant precision at its heart' - Sunday Times

AN ODE TO WALKING FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S LEADING EXPLORERS AND THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SILENCE 'Erling Kagge is a philosophical adventurer - or perhaps an adventurous philosopher' New York Times ____________________________________ 'After having put my shoes on and let my thoughts wander, I am sure of one thing - to put one foot in front of the other is one of the most important things we do.' From those perilous first steps as a toddler, to great expeditions, from walking to work to trekking to the North Pole, Erling Kagge explains that he who walks goes further and lives better. Walking is a book about the love of exploration, the delight of discovery and the equilibrium that can be found in this most simple of activities. ____________________________________ 'If you are a walker this book will resonate with you, if you have seldom or never walked this book should be compulsory reading' Rosamund Young 'A thought-proving and enjoyable book that revels in seeing the global in the local. Erling Kagge reveals new ways to view home and homo sapiens, and, as he travels leisurely, we grow slowly wiser' Tristan Gooley 'Part rumination, part walking coach and companion . . . and one that might just do more for your health and happiness than your treadmill alone ever could' New York Journal of Books 'A thoughtful book-length essay on a taken-for-granted human activity' Kirkus '[Walking is] much more subtle than a typical self-help . . . Erling Kagge uses his acquaintance with extreme environments to reflect on the mental and physical benefits of walking' Economist