Category Archives: Travel Guides
Twelve Cities
Roy Jenkins follows up Churchill with a book of a very different shape; short and semi-autobiographical, but also full of the wit and erudition which make that book such a success. Each of the twelve cities are described with a mixture of architectural interest, topographical insight, and personal anecdote. Jenkins has three British cities: Cardiff,
Guernica
This book presents an extraordinary epic of love, family, and war set in the Basque town of Guernica before, during, and after its destruction by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War. In 1935, Miguel Navarro finds himself in conflict with the Spanish Civil Guard and flees the Basque fishing village of Lekeitio to
The Hitchhiker`s Guide to the Galaxy
Go on a galactic adventure with the last human on Earth, his alien best friend, and a depressed android. Introducing younger readers to The Hitchhiker`s Guide to the Galaxy, this YA edition of the funny sci-fi classic includes an introduction from Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer.One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make
The Devil`s Garden
Dr Forle is a scientist on a river station deep in the heart of the South American jungle: the last inhabited point before the impassable interior. He is studying the eerie forest glades that the local tribes call `devil`s gardens`. Who or what has created these cursed and poisoned places? The answer, he hopes, will
Let Go My Hand
`A humane, humorous and ultimately extremely moving novel` GuardianLouis Lasker loves his family dearly – apart from when he doesn`t. There`s a lot of history. His father`s marriages, his mother`s death; one brother in exile, another in denial; everything said, everything unsaid. And now his father (the best of men, the worst of men) has
The Masque of Africa – Glimpses of African Belief
Moving beyond travelogue, `The Masque of Africa` considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization. Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul`s journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and
The Secret Keeper
Kate Morton`s heart-breaking novel, The Secret Keeper, is a spellbinding story of mysteries and secrets, murder and enduring love, moving between the 1930s, the 1960s and the present.1961: On a sweltering summer`s day, while her family picnics by the stream on their Suffolk farm, sixteen-year-old Laurel hides out in her childhood tree house dreaming of
Driving Home
For over thirty years Jonathan Raban has written about people and places in transition or on the margins, of journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached; of isolation and alienation, but also of what it means to belong, to feel rooted. Driving Home, a collection of pieces spanning two decades, charts its course through American
North Face of Soho: Unreliable Memoirs Volume IV
`In the closing pages of the last volume, I got married. The ceremony marked a rare outbreak of normality in my life. It was symbolized by my personal appearance. I was clean-shaven and had a hairstyle in reasonably close touch with my head.` After Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was In June
The Line of Beauty
It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. Nick had idolized Toby at Oxford,
The Stranger`s Child
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings the charming, aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance to his family`s modest home. The shared intimacies of this weekend link the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, becoming legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century. Throughout this richly comic
The Lovely Bones
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy,
The Bone People
Winner of the Booker Prize in 1985, The Bone People is the story of Kerewin, a despairing part-Maori artist who is convinced that her solitary life is the only way to face the world. Her cocoon is rudely blown away by the sudden arrival during a rainstorm of Simon, a mute six-year-old whose past seems
Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran
Drawing on three years of travel and research, Mirrors of the Unseen offers a rare and timely portrait of Iran, introducing us to the sublime architecture of Isfahan, the forests of the north, the bleak landscapes of Kurdistan and the urban contradictions of the capital, Tehran. An exploration of Iran`s immensely rich heritage and a
News from No Man`s Land
In News from No Man’s Land, John Simpson focuses on how journalists set about finding the stories that make the headlines.On 13 November 2001 John Simpson and a BBC news crew walked into Kabul and the liberation of the Afghan capital was broadcast to a waiting world. It was the end of a sustained campaign
The Winter Soldier
“Part mystery, part war story, part romance, The Winter Soldier is a dream of a novel” Anthony Doerr, author of `All The Light We Cannot See`From the bestselling author of The Piano Tuner, comes Daniel Mason`s `The Winter Soldier`, a story of love and medicine through the devastation of the First World War.Vienna, 1914. Lucius
The Mind`s Eye
Janek Mitter stumbles into his bathroom one morning after a night of heavy drinking, to find his beautiful young wife, Eva, floating dead in the bath. She has been brutally murdered. Yet even during his trial Mitter cannot summon a single memory of attacking Eva, nor a clue as to who could have killed her
Beyond the Blue Horizon: On the Track of Imperial Airways
In Beyond The Blue Horizon Alexander Frater reveals and relives the romance and breathtaking excitement of the legendary Imperial Airways Eastbound Empire service — the world`s longest and most adventurous scheduled air route. Written with an infectious passion, this is an extraordinarily original and genre-defining piece of travel writing by one of our most highly
A Handful Of Honey
Aiming to track down a small oasis town deep in the Sahara, some of whose generous inhabitants came to her rescue on a black day in her adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her home in the olive groves of Italy and sets off along the south coast of the Mediterranean. Travelling through Morocco and Algeria she
Chasing the Monsoon
`Chasing the Monsoon` is a modern travel-pilgrimage through India. Alexander Frater follows the progress of the annual monsoon season, from the funnelling of the weather front in countries to the south of India to the downpour before his eyes, watching the life-shaping impact of the extraordinary phenomenon of the monsoon. On 20th May the Indian
