'Extraordinary... A fascinating and intelligent book.' Sunday Times New islands are being built at an unprecedented rate whether for tourism or territorial ambition, while many islands are disappearing or fragmenting because of rising sea levels. It is a strange planetary spectacle, creating an ever-changing map which even Google Earth struggles to keep pace with. In The Age of Islands, explorer and geographer Alastair Bonnett takes the reader on a compelling and thought-provoking tour of the world's newest, most fragile and beautiful islands and reveals what, he argues, is one of the great dramas of our time. From a 'crannog', an ancient artificial island in a Scottish loch, to the militarized artificial islands China is building in the South China Sea; from the disappearing islands that remain the home of native Central Americans to the ritzy new islands of Dubai; from Hong Kong and the Isles of Scilly to islands far away and near: all have urgent stories to tell.

In an era when ease of travel is greater than ever, it is also easy to overlook the degree to which voyages of the body - and mind - have generated an outpouring of artistry and creativity throughout the ages. Exploration of new lands and sensations is a fundamental human experience. This volume in turn provides a stimulating and adventurous exploration of the theme of travel from an art-historical perspective. Topical regions are covered ranging from the Grand Tour and colonialism to the travels of Hadrian in ancient times and Georgia O'Keeffe's journey to the Andes; from Vasari's Neoplatonic voyages to photographing nineteenth-century Japan. The scholars assembled consider both imaginary travel, as well as factual or embellished documentation of voyages. The essays are far-reaching spatially and temporally, but all relate to how art has documented the theme of travel in varying media across time and as illustrated and described by writers, artists, and illustrators. The scope of this volume is far-reaching both chronologically and conceptually, thereby appropriately documenting the universality of the theme to human experience.

Donna Leon's wildly popular novels starring Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti have been praised for their intricate plots and gripping narratives, but also for their insight into the culture, politics, family life, and history of Venice, one of the world's most treasured cities and Leon's home for over thirty years. Leon's books open the doors to a private Venice, beyond the reach of the millions of international travelers who delight in the city's canals, food, and art every year.
"My Venice and Other Essays" is a treat for lovers of Italy and "La Serenissima." Collected here are over fifty funny, charming, passionate, and insightful essays that range from battles over garbage in the canals to troubles with rehabbing Venetian real estate. Leon shares episodes from her life in Venice, explores her love of opera, and recounts tales from in and around her country house in the mountains. With poignant observations and humor, she also explores her family history and former life in New Jersey, and the idea of the Italian man.

In 1977, a twenty-year-old naive American takes a break from his university studies to undertake an epic nine-thousand-mile overland journey from Munich to Kathmandu. With his camera and his journal, he records and recounts his journey, wanderings and musings with candor and humor through cities and countries that are now inaccessible and too dangerous for the modern backpacking tourist. Like a later-day, international doppelganger version of "On the Road," the search for universal truth and the meaning of life tramps alongside the author while visiting places like Beirut, Damascus, Tehran and Kabul with a casual nonchalance, and revealing a seemingly lost era of more freedom, openness, tolerance, and promise.

Millstone Grit takes the form of a fifty mile walk through the West Riding and East Lancashire, exploring the industrial towns and moors. Glyn Hughes had grown up in the Cheshire countryside but on moving to the Pennines was deeply shocked by the impact of industry on the natural world; but over time he found beauty in its special landscapes and came to love the people who lived in them. In Millstone Grit the author investigates the specific culture of place - with chapters on Methodism and the Luddites, interviewing a millworker, examining the awakening of an urban working-class consciousness. Hughes is always observant, careful, poetic and no-nonsense, this new edition will find readers keen to rediscover his vision of the north.

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.

With his trademark charm and sharp wit, Newby leaves no stone unturned in his quest for wonderfully detailed and quirky knowledge to share with his reader. Insightful, hilarious and sheer fun, this is an adventure not to be missed, by Britain's best-loved travel guide, and father of the genre. 'Why don't you start in Naples and go clockwise round the Mediterranean instead of dashing off in all directions like a lunatic?' Fortunately, Eric Newby followed his wife Wanda's advice, and so begins the wonderfully madcap adventure, 'On the Shores of the Mediterranean'. Beginning during the Newbys' wine harvest in Tuscany, the adventurous but disaster-prone pair follow a path using every form of transportation conceivable (public bus, taxi, foot, bike, boat), from Naples to Venice, along the Adriatic to Greece, Turkey, Jerusalem and North Africa, from sipping wildly extravagant cocktails in San Marco to being cordially invited to Libya by Colonel Gaddafi.

'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.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Latino/Latina Studies. Jewish Studies. RITES is Perera's powerful portrait of growing up as a Jewish boy in the exotic and violent world of Guatamala in the forties. "Victor Perera is one of those rare writers who need never suffer the uncertainties of translation, for besides his fluency in both English and Spanish, he has both a Latin American and a North American sensibility. RITES is another fine example of how affectingly he can cross from one to the other, bringing all his insights with him"--Alastair Reid.

'Solo Round Scotland may be an 'amateur' adventure in its truest sense but it is as professional and daring in its execution as many a large scale international expedition'. Extract from Foreword by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, OBE In April 2006 the author became the first person to single-handedly circumnavigate Scotland by boat and bike. Setting out on this ultimate adventure from Kirkcudbright on the Solway Firth, Alan sailed around Scotland on a 50-foot yacht to the north-east coast of England. After 16 exhausting days on the yacht, he then cycled 163 miles back to the starting point in Kirkcudbright. The 1000-mile voyage took Alan in the yacht Pegasus to the wild open Atlantic Ocean passing Islay, Barra Head, St Kilda, North Rona and round Muckle Flugga, the most northerly point of the UK, before landing at Blyth, Northumberland. The cycle trip crossed England and brought Alan back into Scotland at Gretna and from there he followed the Solway coastal route back to the church gates in Kirkcudbright. This herculean challenge required detailed planning and attracted over 20 people into the support team including an Olympic weather router, an Olympic sail-maker, a round-the-world skipper, a renowned sleep management specialist and a multiple champion in Scottish sailing. The motivation behind the trip came from Alan's deep-rooted desire to take on a challenge that would test his skills, resolve, stamina and sheer willpower to get the job done. It also provided him with an opportunity to raise money for two charities - the Parkinson's Disease Society and Ocean Youth Trust Scotland which will both benefit from sales of this book. Solo Round Scotland is an account of the whole experience at sea and on the road. Alan vividly tells the story of preparing for the challenge and also experiences such as when he was beset with gear failure and was forced to take the wheel for 12 hours in force 8 gales. This exhilarating story follows the highs and lows as Alan battles to achieve his goal of becoming the first person to circumnavigate Scotland by boat and bike. For further background on Alan's challenge, please visit www.soloroundscotland.com

No one writes about mountaineering and its attendant hardships and victories more brilliantly than critically acclaimed author Jon Krakauer. In this collection of his finest work from such magazines as Outside and Smithsonian, he explores the subject from the unique and memorable perspective of one who has battled peaks like K2, Denali, Everest, and, of course, the Eiger. Always with a keen eye, an open heart, and a hunger for the ultimate experience, he gives us unerring portraits of the mountaineering experience. Yet Eiger Dreams is more about people than about rock and ice-people with that odd, sometimes maniacal obsession with mountain summits that sets them apart from other men and women. Here we meet Adrian the Romanian, determined to be the first of his countrymen to solo Denali; John Gill, climber not of great mountains but of house-sized boulders so difficult to surmount that even demanding alpine climbs seem easy; and many more compelling and colorful characters. In the most intimate piece, "The Devils Thumb," Krakauer recounts his own near-fatal, ultimately triumphant struggle with solo-madness as he scales Alaska's Devils Thumb. Eiger Dreams is stirring, vivid writing about one of the most compelling and dangerous of all human pursuits.

IN PATAGONIA is a Quest or a Wonder Voyage. It is about wandering andexile. Bruce Chatwin travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and, as he goes along, describes his encounters with other people whose stories delay him on the road.

A #1 New York Times Bestseller! "Funny, insightful, illuminating . . ." -The Boston Globe Twelve years ago, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil exploded into a monumental success, residing a record-breaking four years on the New York Times bestseller list (longer than any work of fiction or nonfiction had before) and turning John Berendt into a household name. The City of Falling Angels is Berendt's first book since Midnight, and it immediately reminds one what all the fuss was about. Turning to the magic, mystery, and decadence of Venice, Berendt gradually reveals the truth behind a sensational fire that in 1996 destroyed the historic Fenice opera house. Encountering a rich cast of characters, Berendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and surprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately coming together to portray a world as finely drawn as a still-life painting.

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.

In See You Again in Pyongyang, Travis Jeppesen, the first American to complete a university program in North Korea, culls from his experiences living, traveling, and studying in the country to create a multifaceted portrait of the country and its idiosyncratic capital city in the Kim Jong Un Era. Anchored by the experience of his five trips to North Korea and his interactions with citizens from all walks of life, Jeppesen takes readers behind the propaganda, showing how the North Korean system actually works in daily life. He challenges the notion that Pyongyang is merely a "showcase capital" where everything is staged for the benefit of foreigners, as well as the idea that Pyongyangites are brainwashed robots. Jeppesen introduces readers to an array of fascinating North Koreans, from government ministers with a side hustle in black market Western products to young people enamored with American pop culture. With unique personal insight and a rigorous historical grounding, Jeppesen goes beyond the media cliches, showing North Koreans in their full complexity. See You Again in Pyongyang is an essential addition to the literature about one of the world's most fascinating and mysterious places.

'Like rotting stakes in a forest clearing' The great journalist of conflict in the Third World finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-War Poland Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Paris is the world capital of memory and desire, concludes one of the writers in this intimate and insightful collection of memoirs of the city. Living in Paris changed these writers forever.
In thirty-two personal essays more than half of which are here published for the first time the writers describe how they were seduced by Paris and then began to see things differently. They came to write, to cook, to find love, to study, to raise children, to escape, or to live the way it s done in French movies; they came from the United States, Canada, and England; from Iran, Iraq, and Cuba; and a few from other parts of France. And they stayed, not as tourists, but for a long time; some are still living there. They were outsiders who became insiders, who here share their observations and revelations. Some are well-known writers: Diane Johnson, David Sedaris, Judith Thurman, Joe Queenan, and Edmund White. Others may be lesser known but are no less passionate on the subject.
Together, their reflections add up to an unusually perceptive and multifaceted portrait of a city that is entrancing, at times exasperating, but always fascinating. They remind us that Paris belongs to everyone it has touched, and to each in a different way."

Mike Allsop is a dynamo, an airline pilot and mountaineer who ran seven peaks in seven days on seven continents. He's also a motivational speaker, author of bestseller High Altitude, a husband and the father of three children. He's found a way of incorporating his adventures into family life by taking each of his three children on major one-on-one expeditions. This has led to some incredible challenges: * Trekking over 100 km in the Himalaya with each child at the age of seven - most recently Dylan * Twelve-year-old Maya attempting the world's highest stand-up paddle board on a freezing lake at 5,300 metres * Ethan, at 15 years old, struggling through altitude sickness to reach the summit of Kilimanjaro and set his own world record * Fundraising to buy a new house for a Sherpa widow after the devastating earthquake of 2015 The challenges and excitement continue, with the family continually dreaming up new adventures.

Couchsurfing? Surely a sofa would sink on the open sea? Couchsurfing is a global community of over a million people in 232 countries that offers couches, beds and body-sized horizontal surfaces via the internet for fellow members to bunk down on for the night. Couchsurfing is everywhere, from Kazakhstan, where there are124 empty couches for the daring traveller, to Antartica where 30 cold couches are available. It's free, it's friendly and it's the new way to travel. Fleur Britten, Sunday Times features writer is about to lose her couchsurfing virginity. Starting out in Moscow and taking the Trans-Siberian Railway with a couple of stops in Siberia and Ulan Ude, she'll then fly to Beijing and travel through China, crossing into Kazakhstan, followed by Ubekistan. Finding couches in the unlikeliest of places finally arriving back in London to play host to other couchsurfers. With the promise of 'couch available' rarely entailing a couch alone, with stories of meals, unofficial local tours and a family-like welcome, she will explore the unique couchsurfing community and so-called 'couchsurfing spirit'. What motivates people to invite strangers to sleep on their sofas? How is it possible to couchsurf and stay safe and what is it that is it that has made couchsurfing such a phenomenon? This is an adventure of kindness that will lead Fleur to meet the most unusual people and visit the most unexpected places. Combined with revealing, candid images this promises to be much, much more than your average travelogue.

Everybody loves chocolate. From Willy Wonka to Ferrero Rocher, the Cadbury's Flake girl to the man from Milk Tray, it is embedded in our culture like no other foodstuff. The 'Prozac of Candy' produces the same chemicals in your brain as when you fall in love. Paul Richardson has had a sweet tooth ever since his grandmother fed him Lindt milk chocolate animals as a boy. Now, in this fascinating new book, he satisfies a lifelong craving by travelling the world to find out the history of this most popular of foodstuffs. It is a journey that begins in the cacao groves of Guatemala and Mexico, and takes him from the old world to the new, to mainland Europe and the chocolatiers of Paris and Zurich, to Britain and America, and the homes of Cadbury and Hershey. Part travelogue, part cultural history, part literary gastronomy, INDULGENCE is choc full of the hilarious, the delicious and the downright bizarre. For chocolate lovers everywhere - and let's face it, that's most of us - INDULGENCE is a treat. Witty, insightful and wonderfully readable, this is the tastiest book you'll devour all year, bar none.

"...an engaging book: part diary, part manifesto." The Guardian A round-the-world bicycle tour with one of the most original artists of our day. Urban bicycling has become more popular than ever as recession-strapped, climate-conscious city dwellers reinvent basic transportation. In this wide-ranging memoir, artist/musician and co-founder of Talking Heads David Byrne--who has relied on a bike to get around New York City since the early 1980s--relates his adventures as he pedals through and engages with some of the world's major cities. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, he meets a range of people both famous and ordinary, shares his thoughts on art, fashion, music, globalization, and the ways that many places are becoming more bike-friendly. Bicycle Diaries is an adventure on two wheels conveyed with humor, curiosity, and humanity.