'Jonathan Raban is simply one of the great writers of non-fiction at work today. I hold his work in awe.' Robert Macfarlane 'Unfailingly witty and entertaining.' Salman Rushdie Following in the footsteps of countless emigrants, Jonathan Raban takes ship for New York from Liverpool, to explore how succeeding generations of newcomers have fared in America. He finds a country of massive contrasts, between the Street People and the Air People in New York, between small town and big city, between thrusting immigrants and down-at-heel native Americans. Having outgrown his minute rented New York apartment, he heads for Guntersville, Alabama, where he settles for a few months as a good ol' boy in a cabin on the lake with a 'rented' elderly lab. From there he flies to the promise of Seattle, discovering its thrusting but alienated Asian community and thence to the watery lowlife of Key West. The result is a breathtaking observation of the States - a travelogue, a social history and a love letter in one.

A mysterious and rarely seen beast, the Scottish Wildcat is Britain's rarest mammal, and one of the most endangered carnivores in the world. Over the centuries, one by one, Britain's most formidable wild animals have fallen to the thoughtless march of humankind. A war on predators put paid to our lynxes, wolves and bears, each hunted relentlessly until the last of them was killed. Only our wildcats lived on. The Scottish wildcat's guile and ferocity are the stuff of legend. No docile pet cat, this, but a cunning and shadowy animal, elusive to the point of invisibility, but utterly fearless when forced to fight for its life. Those who saw one would always remember its beauty - the cloak of dense fur marked with bold tiger stripes, the green-eyed stare and haughty sneer, and the broad, banded tail whisking away into the forest's gloom. Driven to the remnants of Scotland's wilderness, the last few wildcats now face the most insidious danger of all as their domesticated cousins threaten to dilute their genes into oblivion. However, the wildest of cats has friends and goodwill behind it. This book tells the story of how the wildcat of the wildwood became the endangered Scottish wildcat, of how it once lived and lives now, and of how we - its greatest enemy - are now striving to save it in its darkest hour.

Monocle's latest book is a celebration of the Nordic region, with some surprises, quirks and - maybe - a sauna or two along the way. Monocle's journalists, editors and photographers have returned time and again to all corners of northern Europe for insights, inspiration and ideas for living better. This book isn't about hammering the overhyped hygge trend or fussing over foamy food. Much the opposite - it's about a shared but distinct set of values that have helped varied nations excel in quiet diplomacy, thoughtful design and reasoned debate. Monocle looks beyond the cliches and uncovers the folks, firms and stories that help the region rank highly for everything in everything from art and architecture to eating well. Far from lumping these different nations together, the Monocle team will highlight the people, places and products that show the Nordics in all their nuances: lessons we can all learn from makers in Norway's high north or retailers reaching higher in Reykjavik; the firms building bridges in Denmark or selling Swedish soft power abroad. The world can learn a lot from our knowing northern neighbours - and The Monocle Book of the Nordics is the ideal place to start.

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

The legendary travel writer drives the entire length of the US–Mexico border, then takes the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind the everyday headlines.

Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol to the north and mounting discord from within. With the same humanizing sensibility that he employed in Deep South, Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as family members brave the journey north.

From the writer praised for his “curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms” (The New York Times Book Review), On the Plain of Snakes is an exploration of a region in conflict.

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

Winner - Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019. Shortlisted - Rathbones Folio Prize, RSL Ondaatje Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award 2019. In 2013 Guy Stagg made a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the journey after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him. For ten months he hiked alone on ancient paths, crossing ten countries and more than 5,500 kilometres. The Crossway is an account of this extraordinary adventure. Having left home on New Year's Day, Stagg climbed over the Alps in midwinter, spent Easter in Rome with a new pope, joined mass protests in Istanbul and survived a terrorist attack in Lebanon. Travelling without support, he had to rely each night on the generosity of strangers, staying with monks and nuns, priests and families. As a result, he gained a unique insight into the lives of contemporary believers and learnt the fascinating stories of the soldiers and saints, missionaries and martyrs who had followed these paths before him. The Crossway is a book full of wonders, mixing travel and memoir, history and current affairs. At once intimate and epic, it charts the author's struggle to walk towards recovery, and asks whether religion can still have meaning for those without faith. A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' in 2018.

'Jonathan Raban is one of the world's greatest living travel writers.' William Dalrymple 'The best book of travel ever written by an Englishman about the United States' Jan Morris, Independent Navigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis, hangs out with the housewives of Pemiscot and the hog-king of Dubuque. Through tears of laughter, we are led into the heartland of America - with its hunger and hospitality, its inventive energy and its charming lethargy - and come to know something of its soul. The journey is as much the story of Raban as it is of the Mississippi. Navigating the dangerous, ever-changing waters in an unsuitably fragile aluminium skiff, he immerses himself with an irresistible emotional intensity as he tries to give shape to the river and the story - finding himself by turns vulnerable, curious, angry and, like all of us, sometimes foolishly in love.

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

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

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

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

The story of extraordinary women who lost their way - their sense of self, their identity, their freedom - and found it again through walking in the wild. 'Moving and memorable' Virginia Nicholson, author of How Was It for You? 'A triumph ... I felt as though I were being lifted, carried up to peaks' Charlotte Peacock, author of Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd 'A beautiful and meditative memoir' Publishers Weekly For centuries, the wilds have been male territory, while women sat safely confined at home. But not all women did as they were told, despite the dangers; history reveals women for whom rural walking became inspiration, consolation and liberation. In this powerful and deeply inspiring book, Annabel Abbs uncovers women who refused to conform, who recognised a biological, emotional and artistic need for wilderness, water and desert - and who took the courageous step of walking unpeopled and often forbidding landscapes. Part wild-walk, part memoir, Windswept follows an exhilarating journey from Abbs's isolated, car-less childhood to her walking the remote paths trodden by extraordinary women, including Georgia O'Keeffe in the empty plains of Texas and New Mexico, Nan Shepherd in the mountains of Scotland, Gwen John following the Garonne, Simone de Beauvoir in the mountains and forests of France and Daphne du Maurier along the River Rhone. A single question pulses through their walks: How does a woman change once she becomes windswept?

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

**Soon to be a major film starring Game of Thrones' Sophie Turner - Girl Who Fell From the Sky** On December 24th 1971, the teenage Juliane boarded the packed flight in Peru to meet her father for Christmas. She and her mother fought to get some of the last seats available and felt thankful to have made the flight. The LANSA airplane flew into a heavy thunderstorm and went down in dense Amazon jungle hundreds of miles from civilization. She fell two miles from the sky, still strapped to her plane seat, into the jungle. She was the sole survivor among the 92 passengers, which included her mother. Juliane's unexplainable survival has been called a modern-day miracle. With incredible courage, instinct and ingenuity, she crawled and walked alone for 11 days in the green hell of the Amazon. She survived using the skills she'd learned in assisting her parents on their research trips into the jungle before coming across a loggers hut, and, with it, safety. Now she tells her fascinating story for the first time and shares not only the private moments of her survival and rescue but her inspiring life in the wake of the disaster.

A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve herself to death. Nine people, nine lives; each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. William Dalrymple delves deep into the heart of a nation torn between the relentless onslaught of modernity and the ancient traditions that endure to this day. LONGLISTED FOR THE BBC SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

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

Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2021. Swifts live in perpetual summer. They inhabit the earth like nothing else on the planet. They watched the continents shuffle to their present positions and the mammals evolve. They are not ours, though we like to claim them. They defer all our categories and present no passports as they surf the world's winds. They sleep in the air, their wings controlled by an alert half-brain. Yet for all their adaptability and longevity swifts have recently been added to the Red List of endangered birds. The Screaming Sky is a radical new look at the common swift, a numerous but profoundly uncommon bird, by Charles Foster, author of the New York Times bestseller Being a Beast. Foster follows swifts lyrically, manically yet scientifically. The poetry of swifts lies in their facts and this book, the paperback of the Wainwright shortlisted monograph, draws deeply on the latest extraordinary discoveries.

A special anniversary edition with an updated chapter set 25 years on by Chris Stewart. Over two decades ago we set up Sort of Books to help our friend, the some-time Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, bring his sunlit stories of life on a Spanish mountain farm to print. Ever the optimist, Chris hoped to earn enough money to buy a second-hand tractor for his farm. He got his tractor, as the book spent a year on the Sunday Times Top 10 charts and went on to sell a million and a half copies. His story is a classic. A dreamer and an itinerant sheep shearer, he moves with his wife Ana to a mountain farm in Las Alpujarras, an oddball region in the south of Spain. Misadventures gleefully unfold as Chris discovers that the owner had no intention of leaving. He meets their neighbours, an engaging mix of farmers, shepherds and New Age travellers, and their daughter Chloe is born, linking them irrevocably to their new life. The hero of the piece, however, is the farm itself - a patch of mountain studded with olive, almond and lemon groves, sited on the wrong side of a river, with no access road, water supply or electricity. Could life offer much better than that?

It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Kathleen Jamie, award winning poet, has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer. Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.