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.

Dutch Sailmaker and sailor Jan Struys' (c.1629-c.1694) account of his various overseas travels became a bestseller after its first publication in Amsterdam in 1676, and was later translated into English, French, German and Russian. This new book depicts the story of its author's life as well as the first singular analysis of the Struys text.

A SPECTATOR and PROSPECT Book of the Year 'Ceaselessly interesting, knowledgeable and evocative' Spectator 'A fresh way to write history' Alan Johnson 'A quirky, amused, erudite homage to France . . . ambitious and original' The Times _____ France: An Adventure History is a profoundly original and endlessly entertaining history of France, from the first century BC to the present day, based on countless new discoveries and thirty years of exploring France on foot, by bicycle and in the library. Beginning with the Roman army's first recorded encounter with the Gauls and ending with the Gilets Jaunes protests in the era of Emmanuel Macron, each chapter is an adventure in its own right. Along the way, readers will find the usual faces, events and themes of French history - Louis XIV, the French Revolution, the French Resistance, the Tour de France - but all presented in a shining new light. Graham Robb does not offer a standard dry list of facts and dates, but instead a panorama of France, teeming with characters, full of stories, journeys and coincidences, giving readers a thrilling sense of discovery and enlightenment. France: An Adventure History is a vivid, living history of one of the world's most fascinating nations by a ceaselessly entertaining writer in complete command of subject and style. _____ 'A rich and vibrant narrative . . . clear-eyed but imaginative storytelling' Financial Times 'Full of life' Prospect

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.

In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his account was published as In Pursuit of Spring in 1914. Regarded as one of his most important prose works, it stands as an elegy for a world now lost. What is less well-known is that Thomas took with him a camera, and photographed much of what he saw, noting the locations on the back of the prints. These have been kept in archives for many years and will now be published for the very first time in the book. Thomas journeys through Guildford, Winchester, Salisbury, across the Plain, to the Bristol Channel, recording the poet's thoughts and feelings as winter ends.

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.

'Jenny Tough writes with the same talent, imagination, and sheer courage that she displays in her athletic endeavours. This book will broaden the horizons of all who venture between its covers.' - Emily Chappell, author of Where There's a Will 'I love that SOLO is part-self help and part adventure story. Jenny shows us all that the journey to self-belief comes with just as many ups and downs as the mountains she traverses and that, with a little trust in ourselves (and a few good cups of coffee) the next seemingly insurmountable pass is never beyond our reach.' - Anna McNuff, author of Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups Jenny Tough is an endurance athlete who's best known for running and cycling in some of world's most challenging events - achieving accolades that are an inspiration to outdoor adventurers everywhere. But SOLO tells the story of a much more personal project: Jenny's quest to come to terms with feelings and emotions that were holding her back. Like runners at any level, she knew already that running made her feel better, and like so many of us, she knew that completing goals independently was empowering, too. So she set herself an audacious objective: to run - solo, unsupported, on her own - across mountain ranges on six continents, starting with one of the most remote locations on Earth in Kyrgystan. SOLO chronicles Jenny's journey every step of the way across the Tien Shan (Asia), the High Atlas (Africa), the Bolivian Andes (South America), the Southern Alps (Oceania), the Canadian Rockies (North America) and the Transylvanian Alps (Europe), as she learns lessons in self-esteem, resilience, bravery and so much more. What Jenny's story tells us most of all is that setting out to do things solo - whether the ambitious or the everyday - can be invigorating, encouraging and joyful. And her call to action to find strength, confidence and self-belief in everything we do will inspire and motivate.

At sixteen, Kenn Kaufman dropped out of the high school where he was student council president and hit the road, hitching back and forth across America, from Alaska to Florida, Maine to Mexico. Maybe not all that unusual a thing to do in the seventies, but what Kenn was searching for was a little different: not sex, drugs, God, or even self, but birds. A report of a rare bird would send him hitching nonstop from Pacific to Atlantic and back again. When he was broke he would pick fruit or do odd jobs to earn the fifty dollars or so that would last him for weeks. His goal was to set a record - most North American species seen in a year - but along the way he began to realize that at this breakneck pace he was only looking, not seeing. What had been a game became a quest for a deeper understanding of the natural world. Kingbird Highway is a unique coming-of-age story, combining a lyrical celebration of nature with wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventures, starring a colorful cast of characters.

This beautiful and inspiring book tells the stories of 80 birds around the world: from the Sociable Weaver Bird in Namibia which constructs huge, multi-nest 'apartment blocks' in the desert, to the Bar-headed Goose of China, one of the highest-flying migrants which crosses the Himalayas twice a year. Many birds come steeped in folklore and myth, some are national emblems and a few have inspired scientific revelation or daring conservation projects. Each has a story to tell that sheds a light on our relationship with the natural world and reveals just how deeply birds matter to us.

Comprehensive, illustrated guidebook for treks in the Everest region of Nepal that comes with a detailed, easy-to-read foldout trekking map. With some 150 colour pictures and over a dozen section maps (apart from the fold-out map at the back), the guidebook is packed with exhaustive day-by-day descriptions of the popular Everest trails: Lukla-Kala Patthar/Everest Base Camp; Gokyo-ChoLa Pass; Side-trips to Thame, Chukhung and over RenjoLa Pass; Jiri-Lukla walk-in. There is, in addition, practical advice on planning the treks, plus background reading on the Sherpas, the people who live in the shadow of Everest, and an entire chapter on the fascinating history of the discovery and conquest of Mt Everest.

'It would be hard to imagine a more thoughtful, intelligent and companionable person to go to sea with than Paul Heiney.' Bill Bryson 'High comedy on the high seas. Informative and warm and freezing. It's quite a combination.' Griff Rhys Jones The writer and broadcaster Paul Heiney set sail from the east coast of England bound for Iceland, propelled by a desire to breathe the cool, clear air of the high latitudes, and to follow in the wake of generations of sailors who have made this often treacherous journey since the 13th century. In almost every harbour he tripped over maritime history and anecdote, and came face to face with his own past as he sailed north along his childhood coastline of east Yorkshire towards the Arctic Circle. But there was one major thing missing from this voyage - the sight of puffins. They are remarkable birds, uplifting as a ray of sunshine after a storm. To see them and share their waters was also part of Heiney's ambition. Imagine then his disappointment when, first, no puffins appeared off the Farne Islands, then none to be seen on puffin hotspots like Orkney. When he failed to see puffins on Iceland, Heiney still held out the hope that he would see the 'joker of the seas'. With inspiring travel writing, social and maritime history, and good-humoured reflections on his sailing journey, Heiney brings us this delightful book - a love letter to the puffin, to Iceland and the north, and to the pure pleasure of being at sea.

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?

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.

Bookshop Tours of Britain is a slow-travel guide to Britain, navigating bookshop to bookshop. Across 18 bookshop tours, the reader journeys from the Jurassic Coast of southwest England, over the mountains of Wales, through England's industrial heartland, up to the Scottish Highlands and back via Whitby, the Norfolk Broads, central London, the South Downs and Hardy's Wessex. On their way, the tours visit beaches, castles, head down coal mines, go to whiskey distilleries, bird watching, hiking, canoeing, to stately homes and the houses of some of Britain's best-loved historic writers - and last but not least, a host of fantastic bookshops.

Growing is a portrait of a young man sent straight out from university to help govern Ceylon. It is doubtful that any Empire at any time has been served by such an intelligent, dutiful, hardworking and incorruptible civil servant as the young Leonard Woolf. He was determined to do what was good but discovered for himself that colonial rule, be it ever so high-minded, is fated to do wrong. Growing is also a deeply affectionate account of the mystery, magic and savage beauty of Ceylon at the turn of the century, an island whose diverse beliefs and cultures Woolf had the time and wit to explore in detail.

Lose yourself in this classic prize-winning memoir of life in 1950s Cyprus on the brink of revolution by the legendary king of travel writing and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu. 'Stunning.' Andre Aciman 'Masterly ... Casts a spell.' Jan Morris 'Invades the reader's every sense ... Remarkable.' Victoria Hislop 'These days I am admiring and re-admiring Lawrence Durrell.' Elif Shafak 'Our last great garlicky master of the vanishing Mediterranean.' Richard Holmes 'Exceptional ... Revelatory ... A master.' Observer 'He writes as an artist, as well as a poet . Profoundly beautiful.' New Statesman Cyprus, 1953. As the island fights for independence from British colonial rule, ancient conflicts between Turkish and Greek Cypriots trouble the glittering Mediterranean waters. Into the brewing political storm enters Lawrence Durrell, yearning for the idyllic island lifestyle of his youth in Corfu. He settles into a dilapidated villa, and with his poet's eye for beauty - and passable Greek - vividly captures the moods and atmospheres of island life in a changing world. Whether collecting folklore or wild flowers, describing the brewing revolution or eccentric local characters, Durrell is a magician with words: and the result is not only a classic travel memoir, but an intimate portrait of a community lost forever. WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER MEMORIAL PRIZE 'Brilliant ... Never for a moment does Durrell lose the poet's touch.' New York Times

In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence left England for the first time and travelled to northern Italy. He spent nearly a year on the shores of Lake Garda, lodged in elegantly decaying houses set amid lemon groves and surrounded by the fading life of traditional Italy. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence's deeper wanderings - into philosophy, opinion, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and fragile ancient traditions, Twilight in Italy is suffused with nostalgia and premonition. For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy hover dark spectres: the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I, upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever.

In Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely. Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall's secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects - feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny - as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out 'thin places' where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin. 'It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn't just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist 'busyness', to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out 'the everyday divine'. It has sent me out looking for 'thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.' Beautiful and essential.' - Helen Mort

"[An] unusual meditation on sex, death, art, and Jewishness. . . . Weber weaves in musings on his own sexual and religious experiences, creating a freewheeling psychoanalytic document whose approach would surely delight the doctor, even if its conclusions might surprise him." -New Yorker "Freud's Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired." -John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar "This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud's response to Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty." -Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster After a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorelli's frescoes the greatest artwork he'd ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldn't recall the artist's name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his mind's eye. This is known as the "Signorelli parapraxis" in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freud's own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues. What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freud's biography. As he sounds the depths of Freud's feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past, including his memories of an adolescent obsession with a much older woman. Freud's Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes art's singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires. Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and author of fourteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications.

I can move only with the aid of barrels of anti-inflammatory gel, sticking plasters and real ale anaesthetic. Martin and I descend from hours of walking to the small town of Middleton-in-Teesdale. I walk, stiff legged, into the campsite office and a plump, middle-aged woman looks up from her desk and can see the old timer is in trouble. "Oh, what a shame you weren't here last week," she says, pity radiating from behind her horn-rimmed specs. "You've missed him." I look at her, puzzled. "Elvis!" she explains. "You missed Elvis." Oh God, now I'm hallucinating... In Bothy Tales, the follow-up to The Last Hillwalker from bestselling mountain writer John D. Burns, travel with the author to secret places hidden amongst the British hills and share his passion for the wonderful wilderness of our uplands. From remote glens deep in the Scottish Highlands, Burns brings a new volume of tales - some dramatic, some moving, some hilarious - from the isolated mountain shelters called bothies. Meet the vivid cast of characters who play their games there, from climbers with more confidence than sense to a young man who doesn't have the slightest idea what he's letting himself in for...

INTRODUCED BY JAN MORRIS '[This] gloriously ornate account of that epic journey is a classic' ROBERT MACFARLANE 'The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic.' In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his 'great trudge', a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Three decades later he wrote A Time of Gifts, the sparklingly original account of the first part of this youthful adventure, which took him through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary. Alone, carrying only a rucksack and with a small allowance of only a pound a week, Fermor had planned to sleep rough - to live 'like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar' - but a chance introduction in Bavaria led to comfortable stays in castles, and provided a glimpse of the old Europe of princes and peasants. Hailed as a masterpiece, A Time of Gifts is in part a coming-of-age memoir, but it is also a rich and compelling portrait of a continent that - despite its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers and grand cities - was soon to be swept away by war, modernisation and profound social change. 'Not only is this journey one of physical adventure but of cultural awakening. Architecture, art, genealogy, quirks of history and language are all devoured -- and here passed on -- with a gusto uniquely his' COLIN THUBRON, SUNDAY TIMES 'One of the most romantic books of the twentieth century, Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of a long walk across Europe is also a literary treasure, a rich blend of action and observation' GUARDIAN