When the artist Louis Jansen van Vuuren first visited Paris he could never have imagined that he would end up owning a château in rural France. Almost French is the highly entertaining account of his induction over the past 21 years into all things French: snooty waiters, high-brow countesses, numerous faux pas with the French language and of course, several encounters with the infamous French bureaucracy.

Turning the dilapidated château into a boutique hotel with his life partner, Hardy Olivier, required patience and perseverance. Many lessons were learnt the hard way. Four heaters are not enough to heat an entire château and they will blow your power supply.

And practising your French is a must. On a visit to the butcher, Louis asked for “sheep socks” when he was after leg of lamb. Talk about butchering the lamb!

Louis interweaves the stories about his life in France with fascinating snippets of history, culture and tradition. A must for all Francophiles.

Pre-order now and discover the incredible story of one woman's solo journey across the Bay of Biscay, into the Mediterranean, and the unexpected joy of solitude, self-discovery and resilience __________ 'We have no idea how much resilience there is inside us until we have to draw on it. We learn that we grow through adversity only as we go through it. That we crave happiness like plants leaning toward the light' When Susan quit her job in London and set sail off the south coast of England on her beloved sailboat, Isean, she was unaware this spontaneous departure would lead to a three-year journey spanning several countries across the continent. With only the very basics on board, resourcefulness becomes an unexpected source of joy and contentment. The highs and lows of living in such an extreme way awakens a newfound appreciation for the beauty of her surroundings, for being safe - for just being alive. For all the physical and navigational challenges of her journey, the other side of her story reveals a more important change - an inner journey - that took place along the way. This wasn't merely a challenge, a mid-life adventure or gap-year career break; it was much gentler than that, but much greater too. She was seeking nothing less than an entirely different life, having left the land far behind to call the wild, unbiddable sea home. __________

'Heads up - here's how to run like a pro' The Times 'A fascinating book' Adharanand Finn, author of Running With the Kenyans 'I'm convinced that Shane's insights were were instrumental in me winning the Marathon des Sables for a second time' Elisabet Barnes, coach and athlete 'Shane is the Indiana Jones of the running world' Damian Hall, ultra marathon runner 'You can't but help go out the door for your next run and try to put it all into practice' Nicky Spinks, endurance runner The Lost Art of Running is an opportunity to join running technique analyst coach and movement guru Shane Benzie on his journey across five continents as he trains with and analyses the running style of some of the most gifted athletes on the planet. Part narrative, part practical, this adventure takes you to the foothills of Ethiopia and the 'town of runners'; to the training grounds of world-record-holding marathon runners in Kenya; racing across the Arctic Circle and the mountains of Europe, through the sweltering sands of the Sahara and the hostility of a winter traverse of the Pennine Way, to witness the incredible natural movement of runners in these environments. Along the way, you will learn how to incorporate natural movement techniques into your own running and hear from some of the top athletes that Shane has coached over the years. Whether experienced or just tackling your first few miles, this groundbreaking book will help you discover the lost art of running.

One life sabbatical. Two laps around the world. After being married for a year, Bob Riel and his wife, Lisa, decided to take a chance in life. They took time off from their careers and embarked on a round-the-world journey, intent on having an adventure before starting a family. Then, two-and-a-half years later, when the children hadn't arrived and the travel bug hadn't left, they set out on another voyage to resume their sabbatical experience. During their two journeys, they faced the shock of a terrorist bombing in Egypt, met a Turkish carpet dealer who trained acrobatic pigeons, discussed life with Masai tribesmen, visited a Japanese family whose mother thought she knew them in another lifetime, and watched the sunrise from a boat on the Ganges River and from atop Mount Sinai. Lyrical and humorous, "Two Laps Around the World" is a testament to the possibilities of travel, as Bob and Lisa's explorations also grew into a series of Life Lessons and Global Rules that will inspire reflection. This captivating memoir is certain to arouse wanderlust in every reader.

Cook the simple and flavoursome food of the South of France with acclaimed chef Alex Jackson's Provencal. Provencal is the stunning reissue of Alex Jackson's widely acclaimed first book Sardine. This unique collection of recipes encapsulates the beauty and simplicity of Provencal French cooking and shows you how to recreate the flavours of the South of France at home. Provence and Languedoc are France's window onto the Mediterranean Sea and all that lies beyond, and the culinary influences that converge there make for a cuisine that is varied, rich and deep. The recipes are unpretentious and seasonal, highlighting Alex's belief that cooking the food of Provence is about simplicity, good ingredients and generosity of spirit. Lovingly described, the recipes evoke the South of France with their warmth and flavour; from Bouillabaisse and Autumnal Grand Aioli to a Tomato and Tapenade Tart and Nougat Ice Cream with Fennel Biscuits. The book is divided into seasons and each season contains a 'Grande Bouffe' - a set menu for a feast - so you can really impress your guests and celebrate many wonderful ingredients in one evening's cooking. Provencal promises to reignite a love affair with French provincial cooking, celebrating its multitude of influences, its focus on seasonal eating and, ultimately, an attitude to food which centres around sharing and enjoyment.

Craving an escape from everyday life, Gregor Ewing writes a personal account of his 1,000 mile walk over nine weeks with collie Meg that takes them through the central belt of Scotland, literally following in Robert the Bruce's footsteps. From Kintyre, Arran and Ardrossan north to Ayr through Glasgow to Fort William and Elgin, south to Inverurie, Aberdeen and Dundee, over the Forth to Edinburgh and Berwick upon Tweed then east through Roxburghshire to Bannockburn, Gregor frames his expedition with historical background that follows Robert the Bruce's journey to start a campaign which led to his famous victory seven years later.

After a decade of making documentaries about offbeat characters on the fringes of US society, Louis had the urge to return to America and track down the people who most fascinated him. It would be a reunion tour, but this time without the cameras and the sense of performance being filmed inevitably brings. It would allow him to get closer to people, to discover what really motivated them and what had happened to the assorted dreamers, outlaws and eccentrics since he last saw them. On a journey that took him from the porn sets of Los Angeles to the gangsta rappers of Memphis, from a convention of UFO contactees in Arizona to Northern Idaho for a festive get-together of neo-Nazis, he asked what 'weird people' have to tell us about our own secret natures. Had he learned anything about himself by being among them? Do we choose our beliefs or do our beliefs choose us? Louis Theroux's first book is a hilarious, thought-provoking and at times surreal voyage into the heart of weirdness.

A Turn in the South is a reflective journey by V. S. Naipaul in the late 1980s through the American South. Naipaul writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers and ordinary men and women, both black and white, with the insight and originality we expect from one of our best travel writers. Fascinating and poetic, this is a remarkable book on race, culture and country. 'Naipaul's writing is supple and fluid, meticulously crafted, adventurous and quick to surprise. And, as usual, there's the freshness and originality of his way of looking at things' Sunday Times 'Naipaul writes as if a modern oracle has chosen to speak through him. It is a tissue of brilliantly recorded hearsay, of intense listening by a man with a remarkable ear' New York Times Review of Books 'This is a journey below the Mason-Dixon line into a society riven by too many defeats; the broken cause of the old Confederacy, and the frustrated anger of Southern blacks whose power is circumscribed . . . It is the best thing outside fiction that I have read on the Old South pregnant with the new since W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South published over fifty years ago' Sunday Telegraph

These new essays tell the stories of daring reporters, male and female, sent out by their publishers not to capture the news but to make the news-indeed to achieve star billing-and to capitalize on the Gilded Age public's craze for real-life adventures into the exotic and unknown. They examine the adventure journalism genre through the work of iconic writers such as Mark Twain and Nellie Bly, as well as lesser-known journalistic masters such as Thomas Knox and Eliza Scidmore, who took to the rivers and oceans, mineshafts and mountains, rails and trails of the late nineteenth century, shaping Americans' perceptions of the world and of themselves.

At a fateful travel writing workshop, Barbara, Louise, and Janet knew they had to collaborate. Soon, Wendy joined them, and the new writing group got to work.

LOUISE enjoys easy travels, wine, and good food. She takes you deep inside a Hungarian wine cellar and travels from Dawson City in the wild north of Canada, to Guadeloupe and Barbados. JAN adores the sea. She recounts the adventures of flying around Cape Horn, exploring the Galapagos, and learning to jump off a boat near Ireland's wild Aran Islands.

WENDY seeks out those places most of us wouldn't dare to visit. She's been to much of Africa and Asia and calls Pakistan her second home. While sick in Malawi, she found refuge in a tea estate. In Germany, the discovered lost Jewish roots.

BARBARA, the group's hiker, has traveled through Mali, fed hungry children in Kinshasa, and trekked around Mont Blanc and into the Himalayas for a glimpse into the Dragon Kingdom of Bhutan and the Valley of the Flowers in India.

Here, they share adventures and mishaps, frustrations and delights. They invite readers in for intimate reflections on what it means to travel-and why they are so drawn in by the planet's many siren songs.

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?

Twee vriendinne besluit om die spoor van die die Nama-mense (afstammelinge van die Khoi-Khoi) van die Noord-Kaap te volg. Hulle vertrek met die doel om uit te vind hoe hulle "gefragmenteerde" kulturele ervaringe eenders of anders as die van Annie en haar mense, die sogenaamde Kaapse bruinmense is. Maar wat begin het as 'n soeke na "objektiewe" feite en inligting, het mettertyd gelei tot 'n proses van selfondersoek en 'n ontdekkingstog wat deur noue, intieme interaksie met die mense van Namakwaland, hoop skep dat lampe aangesteek kan word wat die "andersheid", maar veral die "eendersheid" van die verskillende etniese en kulturele groepe in SA sal uitlig.

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.

It has been nearly three decades since Shirley MacLaine commenced her brave and public commitment to chronicling her personal quest for spiritual understanding. In testament to the endurance and vitality of her message, each of her eight legendary bestsellers -- from Don't Fall Off the Mountain to My Lucky Stars -- continues today to attract, dazzle, and transform countless new readers. Now Shirley is back -- with her most breathtakingly powerful and unique book yet.

This is the story of a journey. It is the eagerly anticipated and altogether startling culmination of Shirley MacLaine's extraordinary -- and ultimately rewarding -- road through life. The riveting odyssey began with a pair of anonymous handwritten letters imploring Shirley to make a difficult pilgrimage along the Santiago de Compostela Camino in Spain. Throughout history, countless illustrious pilgrims from all over Europe have taken up the trail. It is an ancient -- and allegedly enchanted -- pilgrimage. People from St. Francis of Assisi and Charlemagne to Ferdinand and Isabella to Dante and Chaucer have taken the journey, which comprises a nearly 500-mile trek across highways, mountains and valleys, cities and towns, and fields. Now it would be Shirley's turn.

For Shirley, the Camino was both an intense spiritual and physical challenge. A woman in her sixth decade completing such a grueling trip on foot in thirty days at twenty miles per day was nothing short of remarkable. But even more astounding was the route she took spiritually: back thousands of years, through past lives to the very origin of the universe. Immensely gifted with intelligence, curiosity, warmth, and a profound openness to people and places outside her own experience, Shirley MacLaine is truly an American treasure. And once again, she brings her inimitable qualities of mind and heart to her writing. Balancing and negotiating the revelations inspired by the mysterious energy of the Camino, she endured her exhausting journey to Compostela until it gradually gave way to a far more universal voyage: that of the soul. Through a range of astonishing and liberating visions and revelations, Shirley saw into the meaning of the cosmos, including the secrets of the ancient civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, insights into human genesis, the essence of gender and sexuality, and the true path to higher love.

With rich insight, humility, and her trademark grace, Shirley MacLaine gently leads us on a sacred adventure toward an inexpressibly transcendent climax. The Camino promises readers the journey of a thousand lifetimes.

The beloved Sunday Times bestseller - a touching, hilarious, often outrageous memoir of home-making and family adventures in the world's furthest outposts 'Hilarious, and utterly beguiling - it's a complete treat to be in Keenan's witty and open-hearted company' Esther Freud 'Deliciously effervescent' Sunday Times 'Brigid writes like a dream ... fabulous' Joanna Lumley 'Irresistible' Mail on Sunday When Sunday Times fashion journalist Brigid Keenan married the love of her life in the late Sixties, she had little idea of the rollercoaster journey they would make around the world together. For he was a diplomat - and Brigid found herself the smiling face of the European Union in locales ranging from Kazakhstan to Trinidad, and asking herself questions she never thought she'd have to ask. How do you throw a buffet dinner during a public mourning period in Syria? Where do you track down dog fat in Almaty? And how do you entertain guests in a Nepalese chicken shed? Negotiating diplomatic protocol, difficult teenagers, homesickness, frustrated career aspirations, witch doctors, and giant jumping spiders, Brigid muddles determinedly through - with no shortage of mishaps on the way. 'There are not many books that have actually made me cry from laughing, but this is one of them' Sunday Times

TV presenter, writer and adventurer Alice Morrison gives her own unique and personal insight into Morocco, the place she's made her home. When Alice Morrison headed out to Morocco, it was to take on one of the most daunting challenges: to run in the famous Marathon des Sables. Little did she expect to end up living there. But once she settled in a flat in Marrakech, she was won over by the people, the spectacular scenery and the ancient alleyways of the souks. Soon she was hiking over the Atlas mountains, joining nomads to sample their timeless way of life as they crossed the Sahara desert, and finding peace in a tranquil oasis. Despite more than 10 million tourists coming to Morocco each year, there are remarkably few books about its people, their customs and the extraordinary range of places to visit, from bustling markets to vast, empty deserts. Alice makes sure she samples it all, and as she does she provides a stunning portrait of a beautiful country. As a lone woman, she often attracts plenty of curiosity, but her willingness to participate - whether thigh deep in pigeon droppings in a tannery or helping out herding goats - ensures that she is welcomed everywhere by a people who are among the most hospitable on the planet. Alice came to fame with her BBC2 series Morocco to Timbuktu, and now she joins the ranks of great travel writers who can bring a country vividly to life and instantly transport the reader to a sunnier place. If you're thinking of going to Morocco, or you want to recall your time there, Adventures in Morocco is the ideal book.

In 1951, the Festival of Britain commissioned a series of short guides they dubbed 'handbooks for the explorer'. Their aim was to encourage readers to venture out beyond the capital and on to 'the roads and the by-roads' to see Britain as a 'living country'. Yet these thirteen guides did more than celebrate the rural splendour of this 'island nation': they also made much of Britain's industrial power and mid-century ambition - her thirst for new technologies, pride in manufacturing and passion for exciting new ways to travel by road, air and sea. Armed with these About Britain guides, historian Tim Cole takes to the roads to find out what has changed and what has remained the same over the 70 years since they were first published. From Oban to Torquay, Caernarvon to Cambridge, he explores the visible changes to our landscape, and the more subtle social and cultural shifts that lie beneath. In a starkly different era where travel has been transformed by the pandemic and many are journeying closer to home, About Britain is a warm and timely meditation on our changing relationship with the landscape, industry and transport. As he looks out on vineyards and apple orchards, power stations and slate mines, vast greenhouses and fulfilment centres for online goods, Cole provides an enchanting glimpse of twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain as seen from the driver's seat.

Despite personal tragedy, occupation and civil war, Powell s affair of the heart continued. She returned time and again through the `40s and `50s, and with each visit there was a reconciliation with her idyllic memories, despite the changing reality of Greece. Both with Hunfry and without, she explored remote mountains in the company of shepherds, isolated stretches of coast and island with local fishermen and olive-dotted hillsides with their subsistence farmers.

The topos of the journey is one of the oldest in literature, and even in this age of packaged tours and mediated experience, it still remains one of the most compelling. This volume examines the ways in which the legacy of the Grand Tour is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel. The essays in this collection examine a wide variety of literature-travel, memoir, and fiction-and explore the ways travel and ideas of "culture" have evolved since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. The sites of the Grand Tour remain a powerful cultural draw, and they continue to define ideas of taste and learning for those who visit them.

Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms: memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the cultivation of cultural perspective.

The nexus between travel, writing and media in the contemporary world is dense: travel practice is increasingly interwoven with media; representations in old and new media are co-present and converge. Digitisation has had a profound impact on the practice and mediation of travel, but this volume aims to show that travel and its representation have always been enlaced with media. With contributions by experts in literary and cultural studies, journalism studies and informatics, the book takes a multi- and interdisciplinary approach and covers a wide range of media, from the hand-crafted album to social media. It illustrates how current transformations invite us to revisit earlier periods of travel writing and their media environments, and to explore the ways in which contemporary forms of mediation are prefigured by earlier practices and forms. The book addresses readers interested in travel writing, travel studies and cultural studies. Chapters Introduction, 3, 7 and 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by University of Freiburg.