Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. "The Ancient Shore "collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples, along with a classic "New Yorker" essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present.

With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard's concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time--often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life--nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it.

Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, "The Ancient Shore "is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.

"Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where 'nothing was pristine, except the light.'"--"Bookforum"

"Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place."--Susan Slater Reynolds, "Los Angeles Times"

"The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book."--"Booklist," starred review

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER 'Honest, funny and dripping with witty aphorisms. Extremely entertaining and enlightening [...] all the way to journey's end' Herald One of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life, presents a travel guide with a difference - an exploration of why we travel, and what we learn along the way... Few activities seem to promise as much happiness as going travelling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel to, we seldom ask why we go and how we might become more fulfilled by doing so. With the help of a selection of writers, artists and thinkers - including Flaubert, Edward Hopper, Wordsworth and Van Gogh - Alain de Botton provides invaluable insights into everything from holiday romance to hotel minibars, airports to sightseeing. The perfect antidote to those guides that tell us what to do when we get there, The Art of Travel tries to explain why we really went in the first place - and helpfully suggest how we might be happier on our journeys. 'Delightful, profound, entertaining. I doubt if de Botton has written a dull sentence in his life' Jan Morris 'An elegant and subtle work, unlike any other. Beguiling' Colin Thubron, The Times

This is not a book about French Gardens. It is the story of a man travelling round France visiting a few selected French gardens on the way. Owners, intrigues, affairs, marriages, feuds, thwarted ambitions and desires, the largely unnamed ordinary gardeners, wars, plots and natural disasters run through every garden older than a generation or two and fill every corner of the grander historical ones. Families marry. Gardeners are poached. Political allegiances forged and shattered. The human trail crosses from garden to garden. They sit in their surrounding landscape, not as isolated islands but attached umbilically to it, sharing the geology, the weather, food, climate, local folklore, accent and cultural identity. Wines must be drunk and food tasted. Recipes found and compared. The perfect tarte-tartin pursued. None of these things can be ignored or separated from the shape and size of parterre, fountain, herbaceous border or pottager. So this is a book filled with stories and information, some of it about French gardens and gardening, but most of it about what makes France unlike anywhere else. From historical gardens like Versailles,Vaux le Vicomte and Courances to the kitchen gardens of the Michelin chef Alain Passard. There are grand potagers like Villandry and La Prieure D'Orsan and allotments and back gardens spotted on the way. Monty celebrates the obvious French associations of food and wine and finds gardens dedicated to vegetables, herbs and fruit. It is a book that any visitor to France, whether gardeners or not, will want to read both as a guide and an inspiration. It is a portal to get under the French cultural skin and to understand the country, in all its huge variety and disparity, a little better.

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

Cairo is a city of extremes. On its chaotic streets BMWs driven by sharp-suited businessmen compete for road space with donkey carts laden with farm produce; in its mosques the wealthy and the destitute pray next to each other. The largest conurbation in Africa since the Middle Ages, it was in Ibn Battutah's words "the mother of cities". With a present-day population of around eighteen million, this sprawling metropolis is home to one thousand new migrants every day, drawn to the seething intensity of a modern, cosmopolitan capital that blends together the cultures of the Middle East and Europe. The fabled city on the banks of the River Nile, once home to pharaohs and emperors, now forms a focal point of the Islamic faith and of the Arab world. Andrew Beattie explores the turbulent past and vibrant present of this city where the enduring legacies of the ancient Egyptians, the early Coptic Church, British colonial rule and the modernist zeal of the post-independence era have all left their mark. THE CITY OF WRITERS, CONQUERORS AND REVOLUTIONARIES: From Mark Twain and Thackeray to Paul Theroux and Naguib Mahfouz, Alexander the Great to Napoleon, and Lawrence of Arabia to Colonel Nasser. THE CITY OF MONUMENTS AND SPECTACLE: From the Pyramids of Giza and Saqqara to the Mosque of Mohammed Ali, dominating the Cairo skyline; from the teeming bazaars of the muski to Coptic and Islamic festivals. THE CITY OF ANCIENT AND MODERN: Where ancient churches and mosques sit cheek-by-jowl with modern skyscrapers and busy highways; where prosperous suburbs lie close to areas of third world poverty and deprivation.

At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge’s Xanadu itself.
At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind.

"Conference of the Birds" is John Heilpern's true story of an extraordinary journey. In December 1972, the director Peter Brook and an international troupe of actors (Helen Mirren and Yoshi Oida among them) left their Paris base to emerge again in the Sahara desert. It was the start of an 8,500-mile expedition through Africa without precedent in the history of theater. Brook was in search of a new beginning that has since been revealed in all his work--from "Conference of the Birds" and "Carmen" to "The Mahabharata" and beyond. At the heart of John Heilpern's brilliant account of the African experiment is a story that became a search for the miraculous.

The essential history of an iconic European city, by Cambridge academic Elizabeth Drayson. 'An admirable achievement... [Drayson has] expertise as a scholar and command as a storyteller' BBC History Magazine 'A glittering homage to one of the world's most beautiful and storied cities' Dan Jones 'Beauty built on blood and brutality... A fascinating new tome' Daily Mail From the early Middle Ages to the present, foreign travellers have been bewitched by Granada's peerless beauty. The Andalusian city is also the stuff of story and legend, with an unforgettable history to match. Romans, then Visigoths, settled here, as did a community of Jews; in the eleventh century a Berber chief made Granada his capital, and from 1230 until 1492 the Nasrids - Spain's last Islamic dynasty - ruled the emirate of Granada from their fortress-palace of the Alhambra. After capturing the city to complete the Christian Reconquista, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella made the Alhambra the site of their royal court. In Lost Paradise, Elizabeth Drayson takes the reader on a voyage of discovery that uncovers the many-layered past of Spain's most complex and fascinating city, celebrating and exploring its evolving identity. Her account brings to the fore the image of Granada as a lost paradise, revealing it as a place of perpetual contradiction and linking it to the great dilemma over Spain's true identity as a nation. This is the story of a vanished Eden, of a place that questions and probes Spain's deep obsession with forgetting, and with erasing historical and cultural memory.

When Canadian brothers Colin and Ryan Pyle finished their record-breaking motorcycle adventure around China in 2010, they promised themselves that it would be their last such venture. Of course, they were wrong. Back in the saddle again, Colin and Ryan have set out to tackle the diverse country of India, and they had no idea what to expect! Whether it was monsoon rains, crashes in Mumbai, the claustrophobic roads of Kerla or even a brutal paragliding landing in Manali; nothing could stop these two adventurers as they triumphantly completed a 54 day -- 14,000 km -- motorcycle circumnavigation of India. In an Indian expedition of unforeseen extremes, Colin and Ryan battled the Rohtang Pass in a rainstorm, made a pilgrimage to the most visited holy site on earth in Amritsar; they also jumped off a perfectly good mountain and learned how to make the perfect cup of Indian tea in Darjeeling. If that seems like a lot, all of this was done while traversing over isolated mountain passes, blazing a trail through the roasting hot deserts and battling the insane traffic of Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. In this book Colin and Ryan take us with them as they make their way through the remarkable and stunning landscapes of India. In the end, the brothers had learned what it takes to succeed as a team as they had circumnavigated a billion people, pushed themselves to new limits, and shared in an adventure that most of us will only ever dream of.

Unflinchingly honest about his family, his failures, his already broken health at the age of sixty?three and the loss of the hopes he once had for himself, Thomsen is also sickened by the corruption and rapacity of our societies, the inequality and the economic destitution. What starts as an almost reluctant concatenation of memory and poignant, limpid descriptions of Brazil, grows into a shattering romantic symphony on human misery and life s small but exquisite transcendent pleasures. He spares the reader nothing.

The chapters in this book are organised to represent different segments of the route followed by the Corps of Discovery across Idaho, Washington and Oregon. The first chapter describes their crossing of the Continental Divide -- three times on the way west -- as they looked for the most practical route. This was the most gruelling terrain they encountered on the entire trip and it was their introduction to the north-west. At this point they met with Shoshone Indians to trade for horses and found that Sacagawea, the young wife of their French interpreter, was a sister to the chief. She had been captured as a young girl and now returned home as a member of the expedition. Chapter two describes another dramatic event involving an Indian woman, the Nez Perce Wetxuiis, who was never mentioned in the journals of the expedition, but who may have saved the lives of the starving and exhausted white men. The Nez Perce proved to be stalwart friends who shared food, knowledge of the country, and dugout canoe construction so the Corps could continue on toward the ocean. Chapter three focuses on reaching the Columbia River, the Big River, a critical milestone that they hoped would take them swiftly and easily to the Pacific. They met more friendly tribes there and joined them in feasts of salmon. Chapter four describes the explorers encounter with the Chinookan Traders at Celilo Falls, the Great Falls of the Columbia, where they entered yet another world in the culture of Northwest Indians. Here they were faced with the sophisticated centre of trade for the Pacific Plateau Trade System. Tribes from downriver came to trade and meet with those from the eastern plateau region of the north-west. The Corps entered the spectacular Columbia River Gorge, navigated dangerous rapids in dugout canoes and survived to continue onward downstream. Chapter five covers a gruelling 150 miles downstream from the beginning of tidal influence to the Pacific Ocean. Battered by storms and tides, this relatively short distance was anything but a downstream float trip. However, they did plant the flag for the United States on the northern shore of the Columbia River, near the ocean, and thus staked a claim to the north-west. This done, they immediately made plans to pass the winter in a sheltered spot on the south shore and made their way across the river to build a stockade they called Fort Clatsop. The winter passed there is covered in chapter six. They brought journals and maps up to date, hunted, made moccasins, and traded with their Indian neighbours. Chapter seven is an account of their homeward journey east -- now up the Columbia. They portaged around rapids and, finally, took an overland route to the lands of the Nez Perces. Chapter eight describes their reunion with their Indian friends and their stay with them while waiting for the snow to melt enough to open Lolo Pass for their last crossing of the Divide. The book ends with an epilogue and brief profiles of Captains Lewis and Clark, the Shoshone woman Sacagawea, and York, Clarks slave. Each chapter contains a trail guide which points out actual sites of camps and significant events and landmarks experienced during the expedition. There are also regional places of interest and sightseeing opportunities listed, along with maps. One of the directives given to the Captains was to collect information on flora and fauna that might be new to science. They did so with great scientific care and skill. At the end of this book you will find a description of the plants and animals the explorers catalogued as they travelled across the north-west. There is also a bibliography and an index.

Christopher Nicholson's first book of nature writing is a beautiful account of an unusual obsession. In 2016 he spent August searching for the remaining snows of the Scottish Highlands. His account of his solitary walk is by turns funny, fascinating and inspiring. A meditation on walking, mountains, snow and our changing climate, Nicholson also turns his curious eye on nature-lovers themselves. What are we looking for when we walk and what is it we want from nature? What is it we see and what is it we miss? What remains when we are gone and what have we lost from the landscape forever?

Bill Bryson goes to Kenya at the invitation of CARE International, the charity dedicated to working with local communities to eradicate poverty around the world. Kenya, generally regarded as the cradle of humankind, is a land of stunning landscapes, famous game reserves, and a vibrant culture, but it also has many serious problems, including refugees, AIDS, drought and grinding poverty. It also provides plenty to worry a nervous traveller like Bill Bryson: hair-raising rides in light aircraft, tropical diseases, snakes, insects and large predators. Bryson casts his inimitable eye on a continent new to him, and the resultant diary, though short in length, contains all his trademark laugh-out-loud wit, wry observation and curious insight. All the author's royalties from this book, as well as all profits, will go to CARE International.

In The Atlas of an Anxious Man, Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary-a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story. Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account follows Ransmayr across the globe: from the shadow of Java's volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle to Himalayan passes, and on to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific. Ransmayr begins again and again with, "I saw. . ." recounting to the reader the stories of continents, eras, and landscapes of the soul. Like maps, the episodes come together to become a book of the world-one that charts the life and death, happiness and fate of people bound up in images of breathtaking beauty. "One of the German language's most gifted young novelists."-Library Journal, on The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

The British Isles are an archipelago made up of two large islands and 6,289 smaller ones. Some, like the Isle of Man, resemble miniature nations, with their own language and tax laws; others, like Ray Island in Essex, are abandoned and mysterious places haunted by myths, ghosts and foxes. There are resurgent islands such as Eigg, which have been liberated from capricious owners to be run by their residents; holy islands like Bardsey, the resting place of 20,000 saints, and still a site of spiritual questing; and deserted islands such as St Kilda, famed for the evacuation of its human population, and now dominated by wild sheep and seabirds. In this evocative and vividly observed book, Patrick Barkham explores some of the most beautiful landscapes in the British Isles as he travels to ever-smaller islands in search of their special magic. Our small islands are both places of freedom and imprisonment, party destinations and oases of peace, strangely suburban and deeply wild. They are places where the past is unusually present, but they can also offer a vision of an alternative future. Meeting all kinds of islanders, from nuns to puffins, from local legends to rare subspecies of vole, he seeks to discover what it is like to live on a small island, and what it means to be an islander.

Gertrude Bell CBE is rightly known as 'The Queen of the Desert' and a new Hollywood film based on her life, featuring Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis and Robert Pattinson is due for release in 2015.A woman far ahead of her time, Gertrude gained a first from Oxford at a time when very few subjects were even open to women. She went on to take an active interest in politics before embarking on her one-woman travels across the Middle East. She chronicled her journeys through Iraq, Persia, Syria and beyond and her important diplomatic work, with characteristic wit and incisiveness. Despite the many achievements of her working life, sadly her personal life was marred by losing the great love of her life, Major Charles Doughty-Wylie, from which she never recovered. She died in 1926 of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. With extracts from two of Bell's most compelling works of travel writing, Persian Pictures and Syria: The Desert and the Sown, this Hesperus edition is truly a unique collection of work.

One of the Europe's most celebrated rivers, the Seine stretches from the fertile plains of Burgundy to the English Channel at Le Havre. Starting at its source near Dijon, writer and engraver Robert Gibbings follows the river's 400-mile course as it develops from a tranquil stream into the mighty waterway that links Rouen to the sea. The journey takes different forms: on foot, in a tiny boat 'hardly more than a coracle', on a barge, and on a boat used for transporting books. Throughout this leisurely voyage during one summer Gibbings records his impressions, visual and verbal, of places and people as well as explaining how the river has played a vital role in French history. In part an evocation of the Seine's changing landscapes and rural beauty, this is also an account of towns and cities-Troyes, Rouen, Paris-and their relationship with the river. Looking at writers and painters as well as historic figures who have left their mark on the Seine, Gibbings presents an affectionate picture of this great river and the people who live and work on its banks. Discussing the vineyards of Champagne, the paintings of Sisley and Utrillo, the rituals of Parisian cafe life, the author conveys an irresistible enthusiasm not just for boats and river life, but for all things French. First published in 1953, Coming Down the Seine is illustrated with more than fifty of Gibbings' delightful engravings.

For ten years Louis Theroux has been making programmes about off-beat characters on the fringes of US society. Now he revisits America and the people who have most fascinated him to try to discover what motivates them, why they believe the things they believe, and to find out what has happened to them since he last saw them. Along the way Louis thinks about what drives him to spend so much time among weird people, and considers whether he's learned anything about himself in the course of ten years working with them. Has he manipulated the people he's interviewed, or have they manipulated him? From his Las Vegas base, Louis revisits the assorted dreamers and outlaws who have been his TV feeding ground. Attempting to understand a little about himself and the workings of his own mind, Louis considers questions such as: What is the difference between pathology and 'normal' weirdness? Is there something particularly weird about Americans? What does it mean to be weird, or 'to be yourself'? And do we choose our beliefs or do our beliefs choose us?

When Dan and his girlfriend set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, his parents wondered how two people who had never shared an apartment could survive in a four-by-six foot tent in the desert. Not to mention the fact that the trail stretches from Mexico to Canada, through boiling desert and snowcapped mountain passes. Despite the warnings of their loved ones, and even some naysaying strangers, Dan and Melissa set out into the wilderness. They are dubbed "The Lois and Clark Expedition" by their long-limbed, loping guru "The Gingerbread Man" after covering the requisite number of miles to be considered official PCT thru-hikers.As the desert gives way to mountains, and the winter threatens to abbreviate their trek, the hardships of the trail provide these addled adventurers a crystalline view of the American wilderness, themselves, and each other. This book tells the story of "one and a half step" Warren Rogers, co-founder of the Pacific Crest Trail. Rogers overcame polio and risked ruin during the Great Depression to chart the trail from beginning to end. As Dan White walks in Rogers' footsteps, he starts to wonder if he's assumed the man's bravery, or his insanity.

""Italians say that someone who acquires a new language 'possesses' it. In my case, Italian possesses me. With Italian racing like blood through my veins, I do indeed see with different eyes, hear with different ears, and drink in the world with all my senses..."
"
A celebration of the language and culture of Italy, "La Bella Lingua" is the story of how a language shaped a nation, told against the backdrop of one woman's personal quest to speak fluent Italian.
For anyone who has been to Italy, the fantasy of living the Italian life is powerfully seductive. But to truly become Italian, one must learn the language. This is how Dianne Hales began her journey. In "La Bella Lingua," she brings the story of her decades-long experience with the "the world's most loved and lovable language" together with explorations of Italy's history, literature, art, music, movies, lifestyle, and food in a true "opera amorosa"--a labor of her love of Italy.
Throughout her first excursion in Italy--with ""non parlo Italiano"" as her only Italian phrase--Dianne delighted in the beauty of what she saw but craved comprehension of what she heard. And so she chose to inhabit the language. Over more than twenty-five years she has studied Italian in every way possible: through Berlitz, books, CDs, podcasts, private tutorials and conversation groups, and, most importantly, large blocks of time in Italy. In the process she found that Italian became not just a passion and a pleasure, but a passport into Italy's "storia" and its very soul. She offers charming insights into what makes Italian the most emotionally expressive of languages, from how the ""pronto"" ("Ready ") Italians say when they answer the telephone conveys a sense of something coming alive, to how even ordinary things such as a towel ("asciugamano") or handkerchief ("fazzoletto") sound better in Italian.
She invites readers to join her as she traces the evolution of Italian in the zesty graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, in Dante's incandescent cantos, and in Boccaccio's bawdy "Decameron." She portrays how social graces remain woven into the fabric of Italian: even the chipper "ciao," which does double duty as "hi" and "bye," reflects centuries of "bella figura." And she exalts the glories of Italy's food and its rich and often uproarious gastronomic language: Italians deftly describe someone uptight as a "baccala "(dried cod), a busybody who noses into everything as a "prezzemolo" (parsley), a worthless or banal movie as a "polpettone" (large meatball).
Like Dianne, readers of "La Bella Lingua "will find themselves "innamorata," enchanted, by Italian, fascinated by its saga, tantalized by its adventures, addicted to its sound, and ever eager to spend more time in its company.

A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor. 'Breathtakingly good . . . Exiles is completely sui generis.' EDMUND DE WAAL 'Atkins spins a marvellous tapestry of colourful tales, beautifully weaving history and travel accounts.' ANDREA WULF, author of The Invention of Nature 'A volume for our times.' SARA WHEELER, THE SPECTATOR This is the story of three unheralded nineteenth-century dissidents, whose lives were profoundly shaped by the winds of empire, nationalism and autocracy that continue to blow strongly today: Louise Michel, a leader of the radical socialist government known as the Paris Commune; Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, an enemy of British colonialism in Zululand; and Lev Shternberg, a militant campaigner against Russian tsarism. In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment - Michel's New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulu's St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternberg's Sakhalin off the Siberian coast - in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home. Occupying the fertile zone where history, biography and travel writing meet, Exiles is a masterpiece of imaginative empathy. 'A fascinating study of exile and its effects.' OBSERVER '[Atkins] is humane, humble, and empathetic . . . beautiful and moving.' ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa 'An incredible, brilliant act of retrieval.' PHILIP HOARE, author of Albert & the Whale 'Thrilling.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A finely crafted and lyrical meditation.' TLS 'Gracefully written . . . Brilliant.' THE ECONOMIST 'Rarely has a book been more timely.' HISTORY TODAY *** Read The Moor and The Immeasureable World for more award-winning writing from William Atkins

An essential guide to the strange, sometimes sinister culture of contemporary Italy. When Tobias Jones first travelled to Italy, he expected to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors and famous writers. Instead, he discovered a very different country, besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia, where crime is scarcely ever met with punishment. Now, in this fascinating travelogue, Jones explores not just Italy's familiar delights (art, climate, cuisine), but the livelier and stranger sides of the bel paese: language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism. Why, he wonders, do bombs still explode every time politics start getting serious? Why does everyone urge him to go home as soon as possible, saying that Italy is a 'brothel'? And why do people warn him that 'Clean Hands' only disguise 'Dirty Feet'?

For years Patricia Schultz has been telling us where to go-her 1,000 Places to See Before You Die (R) books and calendars have sold millions of copies to eager travelers looking to explore new destinations and round out bucket lists. Now, in a beautifully illustrated gift book that's filled with inspiration perfectly timed to meet the pent-up demand for travel, Patricia Schultz tells us why to go. Personal stories and anecdotes, quotes about travel, affirmations, ideas, and travel hacks-and stunning photographs throughout-Why We Travel comes at its subject from many directions, but all of them point to the same goal: Travel is one of the most richly rewarding experiences we can have. It is, as Pico Iyer says, the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. It is something we must do ourselves, since No one can explore the world for you. It forces us to go with the flow: When plan B doesn't work, move on in the alphabet. And it gives us so many memories. Patricia shares some of her most rewarding, like going on safari in Zambia and finding her most lasting memory in a classroom of five-year-olds.

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, Elif Batuman, Burhan Soenmez, Elif Shafak among other Turkish writers, many of them in self-imposed exile, explore a fascinating yet maddening country. The birth of the "New Turkey," as the country's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called his own creation, is an exemplary story of the rise of "illiberal democracies" through the erosion of civil liberties, press freedom, and the independence of the judicial system. Turkey was a complex country long before the rise of its new sultan: born out of the ashes of a vast multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, Turkey has grappled through its relatively short history with the definition of its own identity. Poised between competing ideologies, secularism and piousness, a militaristic nationalism and exceptional openness to foreigners, Turkey defies easy labels and categories. Through the voices of some of its best writers and journalists, The Passenger analyses how it got to where it is today and finds the bright spots of hope that allow its always resourceful, often frustrated population to continue living, and thriving.