Travel

A compulsively readable account of an African country now virtually inaccessible to the outside world and one journalist's daring and adventurous journey. When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H.M. Stanley's famous expedition - but travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his bo...

With its unique, roving structure and beautiful descriptions, In Patagonia offers an original take on the age-old adventure tale. Bruce Chatwin's journey to a remote country in search of a strange beast brings along with it a cast of fascinating characters. Their stories delay him on the road, but will have you tearing through to the book's end.Paperback: 288 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780099769514Published by Vintage UK

José Saramago takes us on a thrilling literary journey through the land, history and culture of his native country. From the misty mountains of the north to the southern seascape of the Algarve, the travels of Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago are a passionate rediscovery of his own land. Embarking in the autumn of 1979, Saramago resolves to travel to Portugal, as well as through it. As his country emerges from an authoritarian dictatorship, he traverses his beloved homeland, neglecting its grand ...

For Wade Davis, Colombia was the first country that captured his heart and gave him license to be free. Here, he tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of their remarkable land. Braiding together memoir, history and journalism, Magdalena is at once an absorbing adventure through a spe...

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places, he noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on countless scraps of paper. In the resulting collection we encounter Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their dogged and oblivious persis...

In 1983, Ma Jian turned 30 and was overwhelmed by the desire to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. With his long hair, jeans and artistic friends, Ma Jian was under surveillance from his work unit and the police, as Deng Xiaoping clamped down on 'Spiritual Pollution'. His ex-wife was seeking custody of their daughter; his girlfriend was sleeping with another man; and he could no longer find the inspiration to write or paint. One day he bought a train ticket to the westernmost border ...

One of the first things I was told when I arrived in Kabul was never to walk... When journalist Taran Khan arrives in Kabul, she uncovers a place that defies her expectations. Her wanderings with other Kabulis reveal a fragile city in a state of flux: stricken by near-constant war, but flickering with the promise of peace; governed by age-old codes but experimenting with new modes of living. Her walks take her to the unvisited tombs of the dead, and to the land of the living - like the bookse...

Colin Thurbon's beautiful prose unfolds along the Silk Road, unearthing a richly layered past on his most ambitious journey. On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. A magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment, Thubron covers over 7000 miles in eight months enduring a near-m...

In Storms of Silence Joe Simpson recalls the severe snowstorm which put an end to an attempt with four others on Gangchempo and the infection which forced him to abandon the climb on Cho Oyu in tibet. During that expedition he has a disturbing encounter with a party of political refugees and a 4-year-old boy fleeing across the Tibetan border. He becomes obsessed with stories of Chinese brutality in the old world Tibet they overran by force 40 years ago. He also begins to question the ethic of...

In a centuries-old tradition, farmers in north-western Iceland scour remote coastal plains for the down of nesting eider ducks. High inside a cast cave in Borneo, men perched on rickety ladders collect swiftlets' nests, a delicacy believed to be a cure for almost anything. These luxury products are two of the seven natural wonders whose stories Harvest tells: eiderdown, vicuna wool, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano and edible birds' nests. It follows their journey from the wilde...

When Elspeth Huxley's pioneer father buys a remote plot of land in Kenya, the family sets off to discover their new home: five hundred acres of Kenyan scrubland, infested with ticks and white ants, and quavering with heat. What they lack in know-how they make up for in determination: building a grass house, employing local Kikuyu tribe members and painstakingly transforming their patch of wilderness into a working farm. Huxley's unforgettable childhood memoir is a sensitive account of settler...

For four months and five hundred miles Colin Thubron walked the mountains of Lebanon, following tracks and rivers. His journey was not only a survey of a remarkable country, but a quest for the gods and divinities who held the secrets of death and rebirth in the land's ancient cults. He visited almost every place of cultural importance, and lived with the people along his way, recording a country of outstanding natural scenery, rich with a unique medley of races and religions. The Hills of Ad...

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast on foot. What begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. A rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Sa...

Translated by Michael Hulse The Rings of Saturn begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia. From Lowestoft to Bungay, Sebald's own story becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. The result is a rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, and an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of a...

Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of this compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself. What could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, the artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, a missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka about a doomed huntsman and...

In this collection of profiles, essays and travel stories, Chatwin takes us to Benin, where he is arrested as a mercenary during a coup; to Boston to meet an LSD guru who believes he is Christ; to India with Indira Ghandi when she attempted a political comeback in 1978; and to Nepal where he reminds us that 'Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot'.Paperback: 384 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780099769811Published by V...