The Taverna by the Sea is an enchanting, funny, poignant travel memoir about answering the call of adventure by taking on the challenge of running a Greek beach taverna. During a walking holiday on the island of Karpathos, a chance encounter with a Greek-American hotel owner results in a once-in-a-lifetime experience for Jennifer Barclay. The best-selling travel writer and long-term resident of Greece drops everything, returning with dog and tent to the remote bay that will form her home for one hectic, event-filled summer. This book offers a rare account of life in north Karpathos in the South Aegean, famous for its traditional community and dramatic, rugged landscape. While primarily a light, engaging, amusing read full of anecdotes, one-liners, twists and turns - perfect for summer - Barclay's fourth book about life in Greece also conveys the life-affirming importance of trusting one's instincts, taking risks and grasping opportunities. Wake with Jennifer to experience a summer of pink dawns over the olive grove and an empty bay, and swim with her in moonlight, hearing only the waves. Or help yourself to local cuisine - creamy yoghurt and local honey and warm figs, olive oil and rosemary, freshly baked bread, and wine on tap. Alongside a cast of characters from farmers to fishermen, mad guests and a wicked witch, meet Minas the hotel owner, a creative, unconventional Greek-American with the ability to fix anything mechanical and create money out of thin air with food, plus a penchant for drinking, singing and falling asleep. Experience days full of music, days of no running water, and days with a goat tied to a tree - but also nights when the overworked taverna manager awoke convinced there was a large fish in the tent, and customers outside waiting to be served. In The Taverna by the Sea, Barclay reveals what happens behind the scenes of an apparently blissful, peaceful paradise, capturing both the magic and the difficulties of island life. Underpinning an entertaining read for lovers of Greece and its cuisine is an inspiring call to live life to the full - and even escape the rat race.

The Sea of Zanj has been a place of myth and mystery since time immemorial, and its islands have captured countless imaginations. Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues, the Seychelles and Madagascar – Thomas Victor Bulpin recounts their stories and histories; stories of strange animals and exotic places, of pirates and runaway slaves, of forgotten kingdoms and deadly welcomes.

Much has changed in the islands since Islands in a forgotten sea first appeared in the 1950s, and the author has left an invaluable account of an enchanting and often brutal world far removed from the air-conditioned resorts and package tours so familiar to tourists today.

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two vast lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a civilizational crossroads. The Lakes are set within the mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and crowned by the old Roman road, the via Egnatia. Once a trading and spiritual nexus of the southern Balkans, it remains one of Eurasia's oldest surviving religious melting pots. With their remote rock churches, changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the Lakes live in their own time. By exploring the stories of dwellers past and present, Kassabova uncovers the human history shaped by the Lakes. Soon, her journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.

'Short of doing it yourself, the best way of escaping into nature is to read a book like A Walk in the Woods.' New York Times In the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Here nor There), Bill Bryson set off to hike the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world. Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack. Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch The X-Files, Bryson gamely struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition - not to die outdoors. A Walk in the Woods is now a major feature film starring Robert Redford, Emma Thompson and Nick Offerman.

In Richard Pococke's Letters from the East (1737-1740), Rachel Finnegan provides edited transcripts of the full run of correspondence from Richard Pococke's famous eastern voyage from 1737-40, together with updated biographical accounts of the author and his correspondents (his mother, Elizabeth Pococke and his uncle and patron, Bishop Thomas Milles).

2022 Silver Midwest Book Award Winner At the sound of the bell on the last day of kindergarten, B.J. Hollars and his six-year-old son, Henry, hop in the car to strike out on a 2,500-mile road trip retracing the Oregon Trail. Their mission: to rediscover America, and Americans, along the way. Throughout their two-week adventure, they endure the usual setbacks (car trouble, inclement weather, and father-son fatigue), but their most compelling drama involves people, privilege, and their attempt to find common ground in an all-too-fractured country. Writing in the footsteps of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Hollars picks up the trail with his son more than half a century later. Together they sidle up to a stool at every truck stop, camp by every creek, and roam the West. They encounter not only the beauty and heartbreak of America, but also the beauty and heartbreak of a father and son eager to make the most of their time together. From Chimney Rock to Independence Rock to the rocky coast of Oregon, they learn and relearn the devastating truth of America's exploitative past, as well as their role within it. Go West, Young Man recounts the author's effort to teach his son the difficult realities of our nation's founding while also reaffirming his faith in America today.

The man with the gun pushed me down onto the carpet. I tried to cower to make my body curl smaller, instinctively covering my head. `Oh God, please don't kill me.' My words clung to my teeth and now my whole body was so cold. All I had left were these words. `Please. Please don't kill me. Jesus. God. Please.' I wanted to live and I knew it with absolute certainty. I don't want to die. Emma Slade was a high-flying debt analyst for a large investment bank, when she was taken hostage in a hotel room on a business trip to Jakarta. She thought she was lucky to come out of it unscathed, but over the ensuing weeks and months, as the financial markets crashed, Emma became her own distressed asset as the trauma following the event took hold. Realising her view on life had profoundly changed she embarked upon a journey, discovering the healing power of yoga and, in Bhutan, opening her eyes to a kinder, more peaceful way of living. From fast-paced City life to the stillness of Bhutan's Himalayan mountains, Set Free is the inspiring true story of Emma's astonishing life lived to extremes and all that that entails: work, travel, spirituality, Buddhism, relationships, and the underlying question of what makes a meaningful life.

**Shortlisted for the Portico Prize 2019**; The astonishing new work of non-fiction from the prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing.; Under the Rock is about badgers, balsam, history, nettles, mythology, moorlands, mosses, poetry, bats, wild swimming, slugs, recession, floods, logging, peacocks, community, apples, asbestos, quarries, geology, industrial music, owls, stone walls, farming, anxiety, relocation, the North, woodpiles, folklore, landslides, ruins, terriers, woodlands, ravens, dales, valleys, walking, animal skulls, trespassing, crows, factories, maps, rain - lots of rain - and a great big rock.; ______________; 'Extraordinary, elemental ... never less than compelling: this is a wild, dark grimoire of a book' - TLS; 'Exceptionally engaging ... beguiling ... this is a startling, unclassifiable book' - Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman; 'Compelling ... admirable and engrossing. Myers writes of the rain with a poet's eye worthy of Hughes' - Erica Wagner, New Statesman; 'A bone-tingling book' - Richard Benson, author of The Valley and The Farm; 'A truly elemental read from which I emerged subtly changed... It has all the makings of a classic' - Miriam Darlington, author of Otter Country and Owl Sense

John Betjeman (1906-1984) was not only one of the best-loved Englishmen of the twentieth century, he was also the people's favourite poet and champion of many causes linked to the preservation of Britain's heritage. Whether those causes concerned buildings, bridges or railway branch lines, Betjeman was a feared adversary of bureaucratic excesses. This delightful little book is a celebration of his love of railways and rail travel. Ten letters selected by his daughter, Candida Lycett Green, each describe a journey that he made or that he planned to make or that he planned for a friend or relative. Jonathan Glancey has added his own words to each letter; words that set the scene, bring the letters to life, that describe Betjeman's moods - humorous, mischievous, brisk for business - and above all, remind us of the age of the steam locomotive in Britain and the many stations closed and track miles lost during the sixties and seventies.

There is so much to look forward to in the months ahead - to lengthening evenings, bike rides past fields of sunflowers or wild meadows of bluebells and poppies (just like the seventies Flake ad) and several months of fetes, vide greniers (car boot sales) and barbecues in friends' gardens. And I cannot wait to get back to see if Andy Lawton has called... After reaching the heights as a successful fashion editor, Karen said goodbye to all that and set about renovating a run-down house in rural Poitou-Charentes, in central western France, and living a simpler life. Her idyll is almost complete when she is blissfully ensconced in her fully plumbed, tiled, floored and 'warm as the hug of a pashmina' Maison Coquelicot - until, that is, a gang of macho Portuguese builders, a procession of Brits behaving badly and the ghosts of boyfriends past begin to arrive on her doorstep. Karen soon finds her (dancing) feet in the small rural community when she discovers the key to acceptance is le danse country. And after a few shuffles and twirls she meets the love of her life - he has dark, shaggy hair, four paws and a wet nose...

In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and four adjacent Caribbean societies-countries haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that they can scarcely believe that the Empire is ending.
In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogart's appearance with cries of "That is man " He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that its roads are extensions of France's "routes nationales." And throughout he relates the ghastly episodes of the region's colonial past and shows how they continue to inform its language, politics, and values. The result is a work of novelistic vividness and dazzling perspicacity that displays Naipaul at the peak of his powers.

"The lure of the high places is in your blood. The call of the mountains is a real call. The veneer, after all, is so thin. Throw off the impedimenta of civilization, the telephones, the silly conventions, the lies that pass for truth. Go out to the West. Ride slowly, not to startle the wild things. Throw out your chest and breathe; look across green valleys to wild peaks where mountain sheep stand impassive on the edge of space. Let the summer rains fall on your upturned face and wash away the memory of all that is false and petty and cruel. Then the mountains will get you. You will go back. The call is a real call." So wrote Mary Roberts Rinehart in her famous travelogue, Through Glacier Park, first published in 1916, as the already famous mystery writer introduced readers to recently minted national park and to the scenic wonders of Montana and to the adventures to be found there. Howard Eaton, an intrepid guide who had become known for his Yellowstone experience, had convinced Rinehart to make the trek to the West. Traveling three hundred miles on horseback with a group of more than forty assorted tourists of all shapes and sizes, she took in her fellow travelers, the scenery, and the travel itself with all the style and aplomb and humor of the talented fiction writer and journalist she was-and her words remain fresh and entertaining to this day.

Island of Lightning is the latest book of travel essays by the prizewinning Robert Minhinnick, poet, novelist, translator, cultural commentator and environmentalist. In it he travels from his home in south Wales to Argentina, China, Finland, Iraq, Tuscany and Piemonte, Malta, New York, Zagreb, Lithuania and the lightning island of Malta. In conventional travel essays and leaps of imaginative narrative his subjects include the annual Elvis convention in Porthcawl, Neolithic sculptures, the cruelties of late twentieth century communism and its aftermath, rugby union, the Argentinian writer Alfonsina Storni, poets playing football, the body of a saint and the definition of cool. His themes are big ones: the relationship of man and landscape, man and time, man and nature, immigration and war, in one sense ultimately humankind itself. Minhinnick explores with the eye of a poet and the gift of a telling image or metaphor. His walk from Cardiff to the Rhondda valleys is almost geological as he passes through the social and cultural strata of the area's history. His astonishment at the sheer number of people - the scale on which society works - in China, results in an inventive grappling with the hugeness of the world (and its growing problems). At the other end of the spectrum his re-imagining of the life of Alfonsina Storni, her love for Borges and her suicide is a delicate commentary on the personal and the solitary. Readers will be entertained, informed and provoked by this series of essays in which Minhinnick takes his subjects as though holding them in his hand, turning them for new perspectives and understanding.

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.

Alexander Burnes travelled up the Indus to Lahore and to the Khanates of Afghanistan and Central Asia in the 1830s, spying on behalf of the British Government in what was to become known as the 'Great Game'. His account of these travels was a bestseller in its day and this brand new edition brings the heady sense of excitement, risk and zeal bursting from the pages.

Smelling the Breezes is an inspiring adventure, that throws down a gauntlet about what can be achieved in a family holiday. Rather than give a leaving party, Ralph and Molly Izzard had their own plans about how to say goodbye to their home in the Middle East. They would walk the three-hundred mile spine of the Lebanese mountains, camping where ever they stopped with their four children, two donkeys and Elias (their gardener-nursemaid-friend) as their sole travelling companions.

'Roger Deakin is the perfect companion for an invigorating armchair swim. Engaging, thoughtful and candid' Telegraph Waterlog celebrates the magic of water and the beauty and eccentricity of Britain. In 1996 Roger Deakin, the late, great nature writer, set out to swim through the British Isles. From the sea, from rock pools, from rivers and streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools and spas, from fens, dykes, moats, aqueducts, waterfalls, flooded quarries, even canals, Deakin gains a fascinating perspective on modern Britain. Detained by water bailiffs in Winchester, intercepted in the Fowey estuary by coastguards, mistaken for a suicide on Camber sands, confronting the Corryvreckan whirlpool in the Hebrides, he discovers just how much of an outsider the native swimmer is to his landlocked, fully-dressed fellow citizens. This is a personal journey, a bold assertion of the native swimmer's right to roam, and an unforgettable celebration of the magic of water.

The incredible true story of living as a modern-day nomad. Bored, broke and struggling to survive in one of the most expensive cities on earth, Paul Carr realises that it would actually be cheaper to live in a hotel in Manhattan than in his one-bedroom London flat. Inspired by that possibility, he decides to sell most of his possessions, abandon his old life and spend a year living entirely without commitments. Thanks to Paul's highly developed blagging skills, what begins as a one-year experiment soon becomes a permanent lifestyle - a life lived in luxury hotels and mountain-top villas. A life of fast cars, Hollywood actresses and Icelandic rock stars. And, most bizarrely of all, a life that still costs less than surviving on cold pizza in London. Yet, as word of Paul's exploits starts to spread - first online, then through a newspaper column and a book deal - he finds himself forced to up the stakes in order to keep things interesting. With his behaviour spiralling to dangerous levels, he is forced to ask the question: is there such a thing as too much freedom?

Chris Stewart's sea-faring 'prequel' to Driving Over Lemons was launched into the hardback bestseller list in May, where it's been bobbing about happily ever since. Sort of Books plan to make this paperback plain sailing too. It will be published in the same format and price as his ever popular Spanish trilogy.