Category Archives: Travel Guides
The Detour
This is the winner of the Independent foreign fiction prize. “A wonderful novel. Wise and generous to a fault of all our human failings and frailties”. (Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip). A Dutch woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. She has left her husband, having confessed
A Moveable Feast – Restored ed.
Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway`s most beloved works. Since Hemingway`s personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published. Featuring
The Sentimentalists
Haunted by the horrific events he witnessed during the Vietnam War, Napoleon Haskell is exhausted from years spent battling his memories. As his health ultimately declines, his two daughters move him from his trailer in North Dakota to Casablanca, Ontario, to live with the father of a friend who was killed in action. It is
The Green Road Into The Trees
Hugh Thomson takes a 400-mile journey across England from coast to coast – one that takes in ancient landscapes, abandoned tracks and drovers` roads. Some are overgrown and almost completely obscured by brambles and weeds, but these old trails can still be found and navigated by locals who know where to look.In The Green Road
Walk the Lines
The only way to truly discover a city, they say, is on foot. Taking this to extremes, Mark Mason sets out to walk the entire length of the London Underground – overground – passing every station on the way. In a story packed with historical trivia, personal musings and eavesdropped conversations, Mark learns how to
The Sugar Barons
For 200 years after 1650 the West Indies were the most fought-over colonies in the world, as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar – a commodity so lucrative that it was known as white gold. Young men, beset by death and disease, an ocean away from the moral anchors of
Castle: A History of the Buildings that Shaped Medieval Britain
Beginning with their introduction in the eleventh century, and ending with their widespread abandonment in the seventeenth, Marc Morris explores many of the country`s most famous castles, as well as some spectacular lesser-known examples. At times this is an epic tale, driven by characters like William the Conqueror, King John and Edward I, full of
A Green and Pleasant Land: How England`s Gardeners Fought the Second World War
This is the wonderfully evocative story of how Britain`s World War Two gardeners – with great ingenuity, invincible good humour and extraordinary fortitude – dug for victory on home turf. “War is the normal occupation of man – war and gardening”. (Winston Churchill). A Green and Pleasant Land tells the intriguing and inspiring story of
A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea
In this inspirational memoir, internationally bestselling author David Vann tells the true story of building his own sailing ship and of the disastrous voyage that ensues. As a thirty-year-old tourist in Turkey, David Vann stumbles across the steel frame of a ninety-foot sailboat and decides to fulfill a long-buried dream: he will rebuild the boat.
Goat Mountain
This is a shocking, suspenseful and daring new novel from one of the greatest American writers at work today, whose previous books include Caribou Island, Dirt and Legend of a Suicide. In David Vann`s searing novel Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy is eager to make his first kill at his family`s annual deer hunt. But
Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz
“A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history”. (John Le Carre).Hanns Alexander was the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s. Rudolf Hoss was a farmer and soldier who became the Kommandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp and oversaw the deaths of over a million men, women and
Smoke over Malibu
The Hon. Lucius Kluge – honourable, lucky, clever – might be the only guy in Los Angeles who`s still living in the past.Lucky pines for the old days of the New Hollywood, before Star Wars and superheroes blew up the movies for good. He spends his days working for an antiques business, his nights boozing
The Last Boat Home
Explosive, dark and tender, The Last Boat Home is a devastating novel about sacrifice, survival and a mother`s love. If you loved The Light Between Oceans or The Snow Child, this is for you. On the wind-swept southern coast of Norway, sixteen-year-old Else is out on the icy sea, dragging her oars through the waves
Fourth of July Creek
This is a dark and powerful debut novel set in the hardscrabble American heartlands. `If I knew for a certain`ty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life…` After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral eleven-year-old boy living
Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War
A Guardian Best Book of the Year 2014 11pm, Tuesday 4 August 1914: with the declaration of war London becomes one of the greatest killing machines in human history. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers pass through the capital on their way to the front; wounded men are brought back to be treated in London`s hospitals;
Willoughbyland
At the beginning of the 1650s, England was in ruins – wrecked by plague and civil war. Yet shimmering on the horizon was a vision of paradise: Willoughbyland. Ever since Sir Walter Ralegh set out in 1595 to claim the `Beautiful Empire of Guiana` for the English crown – and to find the legendary city
To Love and be Wise
It was rumoured that Hollywood stars would go to any lengths for the privilege of being photographed by the good-looking, brilliantly talented and ultra-fashionable portrait photographer Leslie Searle. But what was this gifted creature doing in such an English village backwater as Salcott St. Mary? And why – and how – did he disappear? If
Drawing Conclusions
A young woman returns from holiday to find her elderly neighbour dead on the floor. A heart attack seems the likely cause, but Commissario Brunetti is not so sure and decides to take a closer look. Soon he discovers that she was part of an organization that cares for abused women and that her apartment
At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Paris, near the turn of 1932-3. Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking…”It`s not often that you miss your bus stop because you`re so
Ashland & Vine
Kate, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. Jean declines, but makes her a bizarre counter-offer: if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. If she can stay sober beyond that, there will be another, and then another, amounting to
