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Find out moreFeeling the desire to explore closer to home or travel to far flung places? We have a selection of titles to satisfy your wanderlust. Whether you’re planning a great adventure or reading about your favourite parts of the world, have a browse of our Travel selection.
“Forty-six days, thirteen states, 3000 miles”. Documenting the author’s solo coast-to-coast road-trip across America, David Reynolds’s Slow Road to San Francisco is an absolute joy. An entertaining blend of observation and commentary delivered with a luminous lightness of touch. Buckle up for read that’s radiant with the author’s wit, charm and keen eye for people and place - everything you’d want from an on-the-road companion. Beginning on the Atlantic Coast and winding up on San Francisco’s Pacific Coast - “because Europeans landed on the east coast of the landmass that they named America, and moved slowly west until they reached the other side” - the author’s journey across Route 50 documents edifying encounters that reveal as much about America and the world as they do about the individuals themselves. Though Route 50 is known as the loneliest road in America (and it’s one of the few remaining two-lane highways in the country), Reynolds is never short of people to talk to. Through conversations with bartenders, gas station attendants and motel staff, and the assorted personalities he meets in bars, cafés and museums along the route (among them war veterans, judges and friendly bikers), it truly feels like you’re on the road with him. Peeling back layers of Native American history, slave history and contemporary politics (everyone the author meets has something to say about Trump, and often Brexit too), usually with a glass of IPA to hand, this is life-affirming, enlightening stuff. Perhaps what stands out above all else is a generosity of spirit, both on the part of the people who freely share their time, opinions and tables with Reynolds, and on the part of the author himself. Like all the best road-trips, I didn’t want this ride to end.
While this anthology’s theme may sound niche, its appeal and scope is universal. Indeed, it’s underpinned by fundamental age-old questions: “What does compel someone to leave their country of origin, which is the story before their departure? And then what happens to them on their journey to the new place, which is the story of getting from one place to another? And what causes them to finally land somewhere and decide to stay, if not for the rest of their lives, then for an extended period?” The answers to such questions are voiced here by twenty women whose stories are vary vastly, with contributors hailing from places as diverse as Lebanon, Scotland, France, Germany, the USA, Mozambique, Spain, Brazil and more countries besides. Together their stories constitute a fascinating chorus of experiences borne from the author’s enrollment in an organisation created to help newcomers “feel at home in this beautiful country,” her desire to chronicle female oral history, and a belief in the human need for agency. Joanne Owen, A LoveReading Ambassador
Before this Norwegian journalist wrote her bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul she studied the lives of thirteen Serbs for nearly a year and a half as Milosevic and civil war devastated their country. This is that extraordinary book translated into English for the first time.
A record of travels in one of the wildest and most remote corners of the UK – the Cairngorms. Following in the footsteps of Scottish writers such as Neil Gunn and Rowena Farre, Mike Cawthorne recalls the landscape as his subjects would have experienced it and, as he walks, we see the landscape of today and the issues that beset even such a remote place, ownership, wildlife, conservation and depopulation. May 2014 Non-Fiction Book of the Month. Like for Like Reading Findings, Kathleen Jamie Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, Robert McFarlane
With life feeling empty and without direction after her mother’s death and family breakup, Cheryl Strayed set off on an epic 1,100 mile journey down the West coast of America hoping to heal the hurt and find a new direction in life. The film version starring Reece Witherspoon about to be released, the book of Cheryl Strayed’s epic journey has been reissued in this new paperback edition.Like for Like ReadingTracks: Robyn Davidson Just a Little Run Roud the World, Rosie Swale Pope The film version of Wild is released in UK cinemas on Friday 16 January 2015. Click below to view the trailer.
With life feeling empty and without direction after her mother’s death and family breakup, Cheryl Strayed set off on an epic 1,100 mile journey down the West coast of America hoping to heal the hurt and find a new direction in life. The film version starring Reece Witherspoon about to be released, the book of Cheryl Strayed’s epic journey has been reissued in this new paperback edition.Like for Like ReadingTracks: Robyn Davidson Just a Little Run Roud the World, Rosie Swale Pope The film version of Wild is released in UK cinemas on Friday 16 January 2015. Click below to view the trailer.
'Other things in the world are white but for me porcelain comes first.' A handful of clay from a Chinese hillside carries a promise: that mixed with the right materials, it might survive the fire of the kiln, and fuse into porcelain - translucent, luminous, white. Acclaimed writer and potter Edmund de Waal sets out on a quest - a journey that begins in the dusty city of Jingdezhen in China and travels on to Venice, Versailles, Dublin, Dresden, the Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina and the hills of Cornwall to tell the history of porcelain. Along the way, he meets the witnesses to its creation; those who were inspired, made rich or heartsick by it, and the many whose livelihoods, minds and bodies were broken by this obsession. It spans a thousand years and reaches into some of the most tragic moments of recent times.
For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life - until the unthinkable happens. Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Celeste Ng, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
By turns gripping, meditative and elemental, and always inspirational, this treasure trove of prose, poetry and art lays bare a richness of relationships between female adventurers and the great outdoors. Shunning conventional, simplistic narratives about mankind conquering the highest this, or the deepest that, each adventurer-contributor shares their unique experiences with enlightening, engaging subtlety. In the wise words of one writer, “People go outdoors to push themselves past what they thought they could do…I go outdoors for the struggle, not to beat it.” This eloquent anthology contains over seventy pieces of writing and art, among them an enlightening piece about the motivations of an Antarctic researcher, an intimate account of a mountaineer’s connection with her father through cross-country skiing, and an exquisite evocation of the sensuous life-forces of a Dartmoor brook. It’s a delight to dip into, and the perfect gift for nature-lovers and adventure-seekers.
April 2014 Guest Editor Nicci French on Waterlog. Roger Deakin set out to swim his way through the British Isles: an icy, salty, weedy, murky journey in seas, lakes, rivers, canals, moats, even ditches. The result is a frog’s eye view of strange and wonderful places. It’s also a glorious tribute to the act of wild swimming, which for him (and for me) is a way to find freedom, exhilaration and peace.
The world's walls are supposed to be coming down. We speak of globalization, international markets and global villages; barriers to trade keep falling, and it is now possible to communicate instantly from nearly anywhere in the world. But just as these virtual walls come down, real walls rise. In this evocative blend of travel writing, history and politics, Marcello Di Cintio visits the world's most disputed edges to meet those who live alongside the razor wire, concrete and steel. Along the way he shares tea with refugees on the wrong side of Morocco's desert wall; he encounters illegal immigrants circumventing high-tech fencing around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla; he walks Arizona's migrant trails, visits fenced-in villages in India, and stands with those who protest against Israel's security barrier to understand what these structures say about those who build them, and how they influence the cultures that they pen in. Venturing beyond politics, he encounters the infiltrators who circumvent the walls, the artists who transform them, and the fenced-in ignored and forgotten people who live in their shadow. The walls discussed are: 1. 'The Wall of Shame' in the Western Sahara, built by the Morrocans in 1987 following their defeat by the Spanish. 2. A high-tech 'fence' around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Meilla. 3. The Indo Bangladesh 'fence', erected in 1947. 4. The West Bank Wall. 5. The 'green line' that separates the Greek from the Turkish-Cypriot quarters in Nicosia, the capital of Cypress, and Lefkosa, the capital of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. 6. The US-Mexico border. 7. The various barriers throughout Belfast. 8.The l'Acadie fence in Montreal, erected as a wall built of chains in 1960.
A major Channel 4 series and a Sunday Times bestseller His journey is 4,250 miles long. He is walking every step of the way, camping in the wild, foraging for food, fending for himself against multiple dangers. He is passing through rainforest, savannah, swamp, desert and lush delta oasis. He will cross seven, very different countries. No one has ever made this journey on foot. Exploration and Africa are two of his great passions - they drive him on and motivate his inquisitiveness and resolution not to fail, yet the challenges of the terrain, the climate, the animals, the people and his own psychological resolution will throw at him are immense. The dangers are very real, but so is the motivation for this ex-army officer. If he can overcome the mental and physical challenges, he will be walking into history...
September 2014 Non-Fiction Book of the Month. A wonderful ramble sharing Clare Balding’s new found love of walking since her debut in BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings. Having caught the bug, she’s walked hundreds of miles, got to know the countryside, induced family and friends to accompany her. There are plenty of anecdotes and stories woven into her narrative, a pleasing mix of travel and autobiography bound to be every bit as popular as her debut My Family and Other Animals. Like for Like Reading Walking Home, Simon Armitage And Did those Feet: Walking though 2000 Years of British and Irish History, Charlie Connolly
We all love to travel. We all love escape. Granted, some are more adventurous than others, hankering to cross vast plains of unchartered territory, while the rest of us just want to find a nice hotel somewhere by a crystal blue sea. Whatever your level of wanderlust, there’s something here to inspire, inform and invade your senses. Follow in the footsteps of pioneers, heroes or trusted raconteurs; visit the real settings of favourite works of fiction (See our Reading on Location guide and read great novels set in the place you’re sitting in!); discover off the beaten track getaways; ponder the history of travel itself, laugh at anecdotes of the hapless. In short, by using our Book of the Month recommendations and taking a little stroll around the section, you can discover the world without leaving your fireside chair. Free your mind, they say, and the rest will follow.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” T.S. Elliot