"Roadtripping" documents a decade of road trips through the fiefdom of Alberta. The men and women who make up the Buffalo Gals first set out in July 1999 to experience the unusual and charming roadside attractions of south-central Alberta. Never dreaming that this one-off adventure would turn into an annual event, it's ten years later and they continue their escapades. Each year a new destination is chosen and the weekend-long travel begins. Traditions have evolved including elaborate scrapbooking, eating in gourmet dining rooms (when available) and excessive snacking (without fail). Beyond the joys and challenges of being on the road and a deepening bond of friendship, this book is a love poem to Alberta, a province often misunderstood and mislabelled as being the right-wing cowboy haunt of Canada. With trip route maps, hilarious photos, and appendices including checklists and recipes, "Roadtripping" explores the bizarre and wonderful attractions of wild rose country, stuffed gophers, political fanaticism, mad cows and more.

Martha Gellhorn's three intertwined novellas are concerned with the integration of European outsider into the dramatic landscape of East Africa. It is a story of rejection and enchantment. Two sisters, one beautiful, one plain, return unmarried from their adventures in the great to their parents' hotel on the mountain, where they are caught up in a scandalous relations with an African official and an English botanist. A heartbroken woman tries to escape the memory of her son's death on a doomed holiday by the sea. A lonely, awkward young Englishman, disorientated by years as a prisoner-of-war, orphaned by bombs in London, seeks a new life in the highlands.

'"In one of Tripoli's only English-language bookshops I picked up the book that thrust the desert before me in all its guises. Here was silence and loneliness, the glory of wide African skies, unbroken plains of sand and rock, loyalty and companionship, adventure treachery and betrayal."'

For six years after reading the account of the British North African expedition of 1818-20, Justin Marozzi had longed to cross the Libyan Sahara. Captivated by the beauty of this little-known country on his first visit to Tripoli, he vowed to return to explore its vast desert along the old slave-trade routes. 'South from Barbary' – as nineteenth century Europeans knew North Africa – is the compelling story of his 1,500 – mile journey.

Setting off from Tripoli, Marozzi and his travelling companion, Ned, headed first to the ancient oasis of Ghadames on an improbable mission to purchase camels and find a guide willing to forego the comforts of a four-wheel drive for the hardship of an extended camel trek. Marozzi and Ned had never travelled in the desert, nor had they ridden camels before embarking on this expedition. Encouraged by a series of idiosyncratic Touareg and Tubbu guides, they learnt the full range of desert survival skills, including how to master their five faithful camels.

The caravan of two explorers, five camels with distinctive personalites and their guides undertook a gruelling journey across some of the most inhospitable territory on earth. Despite threats from Libyan officialdom and the ancient natural hardships of the desert, Marozzi and Ned found themselves growing ever closer to the land and its people.

More than a travelogue, 'South from Barbary' is a fascinating history of Saharan exploration and efforts by early British explorers to suppress the African slave trade. It evokes the poetry and solitude of the desert, the companionship of man and beast, the plight of a benighted nation, and the humour and generosity of its resilient people.

Malachy Tallack has been passionate about fishing since he was young. Growing up in Shetland, with its myriad lochs, he and his brother would roam the island in search of trout, and in so doing discovered a sense of freedom, of wonder, and an abiding passion. But why is it that catching a fish - or simply contemplating catching a fish - can be so thrilling, so captivating? Why is it that time spent beside water can be imprinted so sharply in the memory? Why is it that what seems such a simple act - that of casting a line and hoping - can feel so rich in mystery? Illuminated by Water is Malachy's personal attempt to understand that freedom, and to trace the origins and sources of that sense of wonder. He shares the appeal of fishing, its intense joys and frustrations, the steadying effect it has both at water's edge and in the memory, and the contemplation of nature and landscape that comes with being an angler. He writes about fishing expeditions, from English canals and Scottish lochs to lakes in Canada and New Zealand, and he reflects on other aspects of angling, from its cultural significance and the emerging moral complexities to the intricacies of tying a fly. Beautifully written and hugely engaging, this book both articulates the inexplicable lure of the river and the endless desire to return to it, and illuminates a passion that has shaped the way so many see and think about the natural world.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) is a work of travel literature by British explorer Isabella Bird. Adventurous from a young age, Bird gained a reputation as a writer and photographer interested in nature and the stories and cultures of people around the world. A bestselling author and the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society, Bird is recognized today as a pioneering woman whose contributions to travel writing, exploration, and philanthropy are immeasurable. In 1872-after a year of sailing from Britain to Australia and Hawaii-Isabella Bird journeyed by boat to San Francisco before making her way over land through California and Wyoming to the Colorado Territory. There, she befriended an outdoorsman named Rocky Mountain Jim, who guided her throughout the vast wilderness of Colorado and accompanied her during a journey of over 800 miles. Traveling on foot and on horseback-Bird was an experienced and skillful rider-the two formed a curious but formidable pair, eventually reaching the 14,259 foot (4346 m) summit of Longs Peak, making Bird one of the first women to accomplish the feat. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, Bird's most iconic work, was a bestseller upon publication, and has since inspired generations of readers. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is a classic of American literature and travel writing reimagined for modern readers.

Jeremy Kroeker is a Mennonite with a motorcycle. When his seemingly unflinching faith in a Christian worldview begins to shift, Kroeker hops on his bike to seek answers from another perspective. After shipping his ride to Europe, Kroeker discovers that the machine wobbles back and forth worse than his own opinions about spirituality. Still, he caries on, oscillating through Europe--Germany, Austria, Croatia, Albania--and into the Middle East - Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and, ultimately, Iran. It is there, in the theocratic nation of Iran, that Kroeker finds himself on a forbidden visit to a holy Muslim Shrine. Once inside, invisible hands reach into his chest and rip from his heart a sincere prayer, his first in many years. And God hears that prayer. For before Kroeker can escape Iran, God steals into his hotel room one night to threaten him with death. At least, that's one way to look at it. In the end, Kroeker comes to accept uncertainty. What does he really know anyway? He may always fear a God that he can't explain. Perhaps if he keeps riding, one of these days God will speak clearly. And that frightens him, too.

Since the 1980s, Benedict Allen has traversed the globe in the enquiring spirit of the great Victorian explorers, pitting himself against nature and frequently hostile environments. On each of his expeditions, which generally involve daunting months alone with the world's remotest "tribal" peoples, he has turned his experiences into a publication that has enriched the reader's understanding of places that would otherwise remain inacessible to surely even the most hardy traveller. The world is brimming with legends of missing links, from Yeti to Big-Foot. It was these kinds of strange travellers' tales that lured Benedict Allen to the vast green island of Sumatra, in this exploration of myth, reality, and our place in the great scheme of things. His inspiration was Theodore Hull, a muscular octogenarian survivor of Japanese prison camps, who encouraged him to set out on the trail of the lost ape-men known as the Gugu. Through a tangle of folktales, Allen found the aboriginal Kubu people, who offered him guidance into the highlands where the ferocious ape-people were said to gibber and screech all night long. And so, knowing that to find the last of the black-manned ape-men would add

Matt Hopwood set off with just a small bag and a walking stick, no possessions and an open mind to walk many hundreds of miles the length and breadth of the country. He relied entirely on the generosity of strangers for shelter and asked people to tell him their transforming stories. They did. All of these deeply enthralling, profoundly honest stories weave a web of tenderness, connection, compassion and community. For some people their love story will span decades and tell a tale of romantic love evolving through the passing years. Others' stories express fleeting moments of connection, care, concern. Most love stories are marked by sadness and loss. Some stories are concerned with maternal and paternal love, others with a love of place, a visceral connection with spirit through landscape. Love stories also connect deeply with our identities, in how we belong and how we are welcomed in society. Each story is different. Each beautiful. Each valuable.

'By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age' Lynn Barber 'A golden writer' Andrew Marr A. A. Gill was rightly hailed as one of the greatest journalists of our time. This selection of some of his recent pieces, which he made himself before his untimely death, spans the last five years from all corners of the world. It shows him at his most perceptive, brilliant and funny. His subjects range from the controversial - fur - to the heartfelt - a fantastic crystallisation of what it means to be European. He tackles life drawing, designs his own tweed, considers boyhood through the prism of the Museum of Childhood, and spends a day at Donald Trump's university. In his final two articles he wrote with characteristic wit and courage about his cancer diagnosis - 'the full English - and the limits of the NHS. But more than any other subject, a recurring theme emerges in the overwhelming story of our times: the refugee crisis. In the last few years A. A. Gill wrote with compassion and anger about the refugees' story, giving us both its human face and its appalling context. The resulting articles are journalism at its finest and fiercest.

The author who unforgettably captured the experience of starting a new life in Tuscany in bestselling travel memoirs expands her horizons to immerse herself--and her readers--in the sights, aromas, and treasures of twelve new special places.
"A Year in the World" is vintage Frances Mayes--a celebration of the allure of travel, of serendipitous pleasures found in unlikely locales, of memory woven into the present, and of a joyous sense of quest. An ideal travel companion, Frances Mayes brings to the page the curiosity of an intrepid explorer, remarkable insights into the wonder of the everyday, and a compelling narrative style that entertains as it informs.
With her beloved Tuscany as a home base, Mayes travels to Spain, Portugal, France, the British Isles, and to the Mediterranean world of Turkey, Greece, the South of Italy, and North Africa. In Andalucia, she relishes the intersection of cultures. She cooks in Portugal, gathers ideas in the gardens of England and Scotland, takes a literary pilgrimage to Burgundy, discovers an ideal place to live in Mantova, and explores the essential Moroccan city of Fez. She rents houses among ordinary residents, shops at neighborhood markets, wanders the back streets, and everywhere contemplates the concept of home. While in Greece, she follows the classic Homeric voyage across the Aegean, lives in a bougainvillea-draped stone house in Crete, and then drives deep into the Mani. In Turkey with friends, she sails the ancient coast, hiking to archaeological sites and snorkeling over sunken Byzantine towns. Weaving together personal perceptions and informed commentary on art, architecture, history, landscape, and social and culinary traditions of each area, Mayes brings the immediacy of life in her temporary homes to the reader. An illuminating and passionate book that will be savored by all who loved "Under the Tuscan Sun, A Year in the World" is travel writing at its peak.

Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a changed man, awed by a landscape that made him feel as if he were simultaneously strolling through an art museum and scrambling on a jungle gym like an energized child. He has returned to the mountains throughout his life-more than a hundred trips-and has gathered a vast store of knowledge about them. The High Sierra is his lavish celebration of this exceptional place and an exploration of what makes this span of mountains one of the most compelling places on Earth. Over the course of a vivid and dramatic narrative, Robinson describes the geological forces that shaped the Sierras and the history of its exploration, going back to the indigenous peoples who made it home and whose traces can still be found today. He celebrates the people whose ideas and actions protected the High Sierra for future generations. He describes uniquely beautiful hikes and the trails to be avoided. Robinson's own life-altering events, defining relationships, and unforgettable adventures form the narrative's spine. And he illuminates the human communion with the wild and with the sublime, including the personal growth that only seems to come from time spent outdoors. The High Sierra is a gorgeous, absorbing immersion in a place, born out of a desire to understand and share one of the greatest rapture-inducing experiences our planet offers. Packed with maps, gear advice, more than 100 breathtaking photos, and much more, it will inspire veteran hikers, casual walkers, and travel readers to prepare for a magnificent adventure.

In the spring of 2004, David Lascelles invited a group of monks from Bhutan to build a stupa in the gardens of Harewood House in Yorkshire. It was a step into the unknown for the Bhutanese. They didn't speak any English, had never travelled outside their own culture, had never flown in an airplane or seen the ocean. Theirs was one kind of journey, but the project was also another kind of voyage for David. It was an attempt to reconcile a deep interest in Buddhism with the 250 years that his family has lived at Harewood, the country house and estate - with its links to one of the darkest chapters in Britain's colonial past - that he has loved, rejected, tried to make sense of and been haunted by all his life. In Buddhist thought, one of the functions of a stupa is to harmonise the environment in which it is built and subdue the chaotic forces at work there. Would this stupa have a similar effect, quelling the forces of Harewood's past and harmonising the contradictions of its present? A Hare-Marked Moon tells the story behind the extraordinary meeting of cultures that resulted in the Harewood Stupa, interspersed with accounts of David's travels in the Himalayas which delve into the rich and turbulent history of the region, and the beliefs that have shaped it.

Elma Napier's love affair with Dominica, then a British colony, began in 1932 when she turned her back on London's high society to build a home in a remote coastal village on that most mysterious and seductive of all Caribbean islands. Black and White Sands is the memoir of her life there - of bohemian house-parties, war and death, smugglers and servants and, above all, of stories inspired by her political life as the only woman in a colonial parliament, her love for the island's turbulent landscapes and her curiosity about the lives and culture of its people.

Although one of the world's smallest countries, Qatar punches well above its weight in terms of art and culture. It is home to innovative and striking pieces of public art as well as art-filled museums designed by world-famous architects. This is all part of a far-reaching plan to focus on becoming a culture-based, rather than carbon-based, economy - a plan which Sheikha Mayassa has spearheaded on every level. It is this which makes The Power of Culture so informative and readable. Sheikha Mayassa's personality shines through every page, whether discussing the delights to be found in museums and galleries, or commenting on her favourite place to see wild life and where to find the best abayas. Part easy-to-read guide and part memoir, The Power of Culture offers a completely original insight into the Qatar of today, enhanced with in-depth interviews by Sheikha Mayassa with some of the leading architects and artists who have contributed to its success. Text in English, Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish.

Jamaica used to be the source of much of Britain's wealth, a tropical paradise for the planters, a Babylonian exile for the Africans shipped to the Caribbean. It became independent in 1962. Jamaica is now a country in despair. It has become a cockpit of gang warfare, drug crime and poverty. Haunted by the legacy of imperialism, its social and racial divisions seem entrenched. Its extraordinary musical tradition and physical beauty are shadowed by casual murder, police brutality and political corruption. Ian Thomson shows a side of Jamaica that tourists rarely see.He met ordinary Jamaicans in their homes and workplaces; and his encounters with the white elite, who still own most of Jamaica's businesses and newspapers, are unforgettable. Thomson brings alive the country's unique racial and ethnic mix; the all-pervading influence of the USA; and the increasing disillusionment felt by its people, who can't rely on the state for their most basic security. At the heart of the book is Jamaica's tense, uneasy relationship with Britain, to whom it remains politically and culturally bound.

George Paloczi-Horvath was born in 1908 into the feudal nobility of Hungary. Despite his privileged background, he came to realize that his family's wealth was based on the exploitation of a brutalized peasantry. By the 1930s he was an active anti-Nazi; by 1941 he was forced to flee the country. Returning after the war, he became a dedicated communist; but this didn't prevent him from being arrested, tortured and imprisoned by the communist regime. He spent 1,832 days in prison, many of them in the solitary confinement of underground prison cells. In 1954 he was eventually released; but after the Hungarian Revolution he was forced to escape with his wife and baby for sanctuary in Britain. A new afterword by his widow, Agi Argent, describes how they survived.

Sharp, funny and unflinchingly honest, Jayne Tuttle's memoir lifts you off the page and into a Paris far beyond the postcards. This new edition of Paris or Die is a headlong plunge into not just life in Paris, but life itself. Aspiring actor Jayne lives in Melbourne, where she dreams of a creative life. But after her mother dies unexpectedly, Jayne loses her bearings. Untethered, heartsick, she is soon on a plane to Paris with no return ticket. The city, it seems, has its own plans for her. She finds herself in a vibrant and dizzying neighbourhood, living in a former monastery, studying at a famous theatre school, falling in love with a Frenchman too beautiful to be real. She will forget her past and disappear into the culture if it kills her. And one strange night, it nearly does. Raw, real and evocative, Paris or Die is an unforgettable picture of love, grief and adventure.

Rubens' Antwerp: A Guide highlights the life and work of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in a comprehensive and accessible way. The Antwerp museums and churches contain about a hundred paintings, drawings, designs and sketches by Rubens. A large part of those are public. Antwerp is the only city in the world that is so deeply rooted with Peter Paul Rubens and his baroque heritage. Rubens' Antwerp: A Guide allows you to experience Rubens and the Baroque in an intense way. This multifaceted acquaintance with Rubens goes hand in hand with a dive into the glorious past of the vibrant city of culture, where the master's life largely took place. A mapped walk takes you to the various places in Antwerp where Rubens' work can be seen. You can visit his house with the studio, where so many masterpieces came about. You also visit the homes of his friends Balthasar Moretus and Nicolaas Rockox, and you can admire paintings of him in the historic churches in the rooms for which they were made. 2018 is the official Rubens' year.

Few novelists have written so intimately about a city in the way that Charles Dickens wrote about London. A near-photographic memory made his contact with the city indelible from a very young age and it remained his constant focus. Virginia Woolf maintained that, `we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens,' as he produces `characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks.' But the `character' he was drawn back to throughout his novels was London itself, all aspects of the capital from the coaching inns of his early years to the taverns and watermen of the Thames; these were the constant cityscapes of his life and work. Based on five walks in central London, Peter Clark illuminates the settings of Dickens's London, his life, his journalism and his fiction. He also explores `The First Suburbs' (Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Highgate and Limehouse) as they feature in Dickens's writing.

'One June day in 1953 aged twelve I sat in a classroom and drew a map.' The map that the young Hamilton-Paterson drew was of a tropical island, and it prefigured with uncanny accuracy the Philippine island on which, thirty years later, he would spend a full third of each year, entirely alone. It had a coral strand, a field of grass, vertical volcanic cliffs and no water. He survived by fishing and by drinking rainwater. This is a book about a remarkable and self-sufficient writer's 'desire to be lost', and the journey of a conventionally educated Englishman to an island on the far side of the world that aroused in him a feeling of discovering a place he always knew. Hamilton-Paterson writes with incomparable skill about the hard beauty of the sea, of coral reefs and the animals that live in them, and about the fishermen who eke a living among the labyrinth of islands that make up the Philippines.

The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, and reportage from around the world. Its aim, to break down barriers and introduce the essence of the place. Packed with essays and investigative journalism; original photography and illustrations; charts, and unusual facts and observations, each volume offers a unique insight into a different culture, and how history has shaped the place into what it is today. Brimming with intricate research and enduring wonder, The Passenger is a love-letter to global travel. IN THIS VOLUME, Peter Schneider, Cees Nooteboom, Vincenzo Latronico among other German writers tell of a youthful city that doesn't cling to its "poor but sexy" past. "Berlin is too big for Berlin" is the curious title of a book by the flaneur Hanns Zischler, who joked about the low population density of a city so spread-out and polycentric-one of the reasons why it still inspires feelings of freedom and space. But the phrase also carries a symbolic, broader meaning: how can a single city encompass and sustain such a weighty mythology as that of contemporary Berlin, "the capital of cool"? In order to find out, it is necessary to go back to the origins of today's Berlin, when time seemed to have stopped. The scars of a century of war were still visible everywhere: coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future. The city's youth seemed to have appropriated-and turned into a positive-the famous phrase pronounced by Karl Scheffler at the beginning of the 20th century: "Berlin is a place doomed to always become, never be."

In "High Latitudes," Farley Mowat chronicles for the first time the hazardous journey he took across northern Canada in 1966. He hoped to write a book that would let northern people speak for themselves and that would expose the speciousness of the political idea that the North was "a bloody great wasteland" with no people in it, and therefore resource developers could exploit it however they chose. For reasons Mowat describes, that book did not get written then. But here it is now, with the original conversations recorded by Mowat during that epic journey.

In vintage Mowat fashion, the legendary writer delivers a sweeping narrative brimming with breathtaking nature writing, suspenseful storytelling, larger-than-life characters, ferocious humor, pitiless rage, iconoclastic insights, and compassionate concern. In her foreword, Margaret Atwood writes: ""High Latitudes" gives us, with passion and insight, a vertical section of time past--the time that preceded our present. The choices that were made then affect our now, just as the choices we make now will determine the future..."

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess. In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam. Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word. It is an extraordinary document which gives voice to a way of living in the world which we have all but lost. 'All things were once people', the /Xam said. Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the global pandemic, but she had gathered enough from reading the archive, seeing the /Xam lands and from talking to anyone and everyone she met along the way, to be able to write this haunting and powerful book, while living her own precarious lockdown life. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers.

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