Category Archives: Travel Guides
Swallows and Amazons
The ultimate children`s classic – long summer days filled with adventure. John, Susan, Titty and Roger sail their boat, Swallow, to a deserted island for a summer camping trip. Exploring and playing sailors is an adventure in itself but the island holds more excitement in store. Two fierce Amazon pirates, Nancy and Peggy, challenge them
Two Lipsticks and a Lover
Why is it that French women look just as glamorous in a T-shirt and pair of jeans as in a sleek designer dress? How do they look sexy, chic and timelessly elegant from eighteen to eighty? Pencil-thin, stylishly dressed and, always, impeccably groomed? In search of answers, travel and lifestyle journalist, Helena Frith Powell goes
Tomaz Humar
In August, 2005, Tomaz Humar was trapped on a narrow ledge at 5900 metres on the formidable Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat. He had been attempting a new route, directly up the middle of the highest mountain face in the world – solo. After six days he was out of food, almost out of fuel
Higher than the Eagle Soars – A Path to Everest
Stephen Venables is one of the greatest British climbers of his generation and he has now written a full autobiography – Higher than the Eagle Soars – A Path to Everest. He explores how and – more importantly – why he became a mountaineer, and reveals a series of never-recorded adventures on four continents.A highly
Downstream
“Downstream” is a celebration of rivers: an exploration of what they mean to us and an account of what we owe to them. Tom Fort followed the course of our third largest, and one of our least known rivers from source to the sea – the River Trent. Travelling partly on foot and bicycle, but
Risotto With Nettles – A Memoir With Food
Born in Milan, Anna del Conte grew up in Italy in a gentler time. When war came to Italy everything changed: her family had to abandon their apartment and the city for the countryside, where the peasants still ate well, but life was dangerous…As a teenager, Anna became used to throwing herself into a ditch
Out Stealing Horses
Per Pettersen`s Out Stealing Horses is a beautiful novel, with its beguiling prose communicating loss and melancholy that even translation cannot tarnish. In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events – the accidental death of a child, his best friend`s feelings of guilt and eventual
After Dark
The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. Later, Mari is interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel; a Chinese prostitute has
On The Road To Babadag
Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveller. His journeys – by car, train, bus, ferry – take him from his native Poland to small towns and villages with unfamiliar yet evocative names in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine. Here is an unfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the Communist era
The Quiet Girl
The Quiet Girl is a lyrical, striking novel from Danish novelist Peter Hรธeg, the author of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. Kasper Krone is a world renowned clown with exceptional powers of hearing and a deep love of Bach’s music but life is about to change’ฆWanted for tax evasion and on the verge of extradition,
Panther Soup:A European Journey in War & Peace
By the end of World War II much of Western Europe was in chaos. The future of our world had been contested here, in the hinterlands of France and across the German plains. But what`s become of the battlefields now? Or the people that lived on them? And is there any trace of the 2.7
Mao The Unknown Story
Jung Chang`s `Wild Swans` was an extraordinary bestseller throughout the world, selling more than 10 million copies and reaching a wider readership than any other book about China. Now she and her husband Jon Halliday have written a groundbreaking biography of Mao Tse-tung. Based on a decade of research, and on interviews with many of
Berlin Poplars
On a remote farm in northern Norway, eighty-year-old Anna Neshov is rushed to hospital after suffering a stroke. Her three sons have not spoken in some time. Margido, a devout Christian, works in Trondheim as a funeral director. Erlend, a successful window dresser, lives a life of luxury in a penthouse in Copenhagen, while Tor,
Peeling the Onion
Peeling the Onion is a searingly honest account of Grass` modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians, and the writing of his masterpiece, The Tin Drum, in Paris. It is a remarkable autobiography and, without question, one of Gunter Grass` finest works. By the Nobel Prize-winning author of The
Children of the Revolution
Seventeen years after fleeing the revolutionary Ethiopia that claimed his father`s life, Stepha Stephanos is a man still caught between two existences: the one he left behind, aged nineteen, and the new life he has forged in Washington D.C. Sepha spends his days in a sort of limbo: quietly running his grocery store into the
The Dogs & The Wolves
Ada grows up motherless in the Jewish pogroms of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century. In the same city, Harry Sinner, the cosseted son of a city financier, belongs to a very different world. Eventually, in search of a brighter future, Ada moves to Paris and makes a living painting
The Convent
Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad…The convent of Our Lady of Mercy stands alone in an uninhabited part of the Spanish sierra. Its inhabitants are devoted to God, to solitude and silence; six women cut off from the world they`ve chosen to leave behind. Everything changes on the day that a
Travels With Boogie
“Travels With Boogie” is the story of two city slickers – one an unattractive but streetwise mongrel from Stockwell, the other the long-suffering author – and how they came to terms with England`s countryside and waterways. First they had to survive against all odds as they embarked on a heroic journey up hill and down
Blood, Bones and Butter: The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef
Blood, Bones and Butter follows the chef Gabrielle Hamilton`s extraordinary journey through the places she has inhabited over the years. The rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with wooden spoon in hand. The French, Greek and Turkish kitchens, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned
Nada
Eighteen-year old Andrea moves to Barcelona to stay with relatives she has not seen in years while she pursues her dreams of studying at university. Arriving in the dead of night she discovers not the independence she craves, but a crumbling apartment and an eccentric collection of misfits whose psychological ruin and violent behaviour echoes
