Category Archives: Travel Guides
Invisible Cities
In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote `Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a
If On a Winter`s Night a Traveller
Calvino`s masterpiece opens with a scene that`s reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, it`s taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are
Little Infamies
Panos Karnezis` remarkable stories are all set in the same nameless Greek village. His characters are the people who live there – the priest, the barber, the whore, the doctor, the seamstress, the mayor – and the occasional animal: a centaur, a parrot that recites Homer, a horse called History. Their lives intersect, as lives
Allah Is Not Obliged
The full, final and completely complete title of my bullshit story is: Allah is not obliged to be fair about all things he does here on earth`. Birahima`s story is one of horror and laughter. After his mother`s death he travels to Liberia to find his aunt but on the way gets caught up in
Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow
Climbers who court danger in the world`s highest places risk far more than just their own skins. When tragedy strikes, what happens to the people who love them? Why would anyone choose to invest in a future with a high-altitude climber? What is life like in the shadow of the mountain? Such questions have long
In The Pink
When two city girls embark on an afternoon of idle window-shopping in Worcestershire and end up buying a horse, their lives swerve gloriously off course. Within weeks, they have abandoned their careers in London in favour of life in the wilds of Ledbury. But, their dreams of a sunny rural idyll, preferably funded by a
Running With the Moon
Jonny Bealby was devastated when his fiancee Melanie died unexpectedly while they were travelling in Kashmir. Two years later, still heartbroken and utterly disillusioned, he took on the challenge of a lifetime. Setting out with only his motorbike for company, he began a daring and dangerous journey around the African continent in a desperate attempt
The Lost World of the Kalahari
In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post recounts his rediscovery of the Bushmen, outcast survivors from Stone Age Africa. Faced with successive attacks, the Bushmen have retreated deep into the heart of the Kalahari Desert, now dissected by the Namibian-South African border. After a gruelling trek Laurens van der Post finds
For A Pagan Song – Travels in India Pakistan & Afghanistan
For a Pagan Song tells the story of how Jonny Bealby follows in the footsteps of his two heroes from literature, Kipling and Dravot, travelling across remote parts of India and Pakistan and into war-torn Afghanistan. Picturing himself seated by a roaring fire, listening to the song of a pagan chief, Jonny sets out to
Night of the New Moon
This book is the remarkable story of his experiences in the prison camp, but it is also a meditation on the morality of the Bomb, a compassionate and moving contemplation of human violence.
A Countryside For All
The rural fuse has been lit. The countryside is tinder-dry. Post offices and banks, shops and schools are closing. Farmers are going out of business. Houses are becoming unaffordable as prices soar ad poverty grows. Pollution and over-exploitation are destroying landscapes. Many rural communities are on the verge of collapse. Some fear the foot- and
To The Last City
Winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award`s Outstanding Contribution to Travel WritingTo the Last City is a fictional offering from Colin Thubron set deep in the Peruvian Andes. The novel follows the journeys of five ill-prepared travellers – men and women with different values, backgrounds, temperaments and motives. As the group trek through
Ladies Coupe
Meet Akhilandeswari, Akhila for short: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life – always the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the provider. Until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. In the intimate atmosphere of the
Who`s Sorry Now
Marvin Kreitman, the luggage baron of South London, lives for sex. Or at least he lives for women. At present he loves four women – his mother, his wife Hazel, and his two daughters – and is in love with five more. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, nice Charlie, loves just the one woman,
Red Dog
`In early 1998 I went to Perth in Western Australia in order to attend the literature festival, and part of the arrangement was that I should go to Karratha to do their first ever literary dinner. Karratha is a mining town a long way further north. The landscape is extraordinary, being composed of vast heaps
Crow Lake
Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so compelling, and with an emotional charge so perfectly controlled, that you sense at once that this is the real thing – a literary experience to relish, a book to lose yourself in, and a name to watch. Here is a gorgeous, slowburning
Love and Garbage
The narrator of Love and Garbage has temporarily abandoned his work-in-progress – an essay on Kafka – and exchanged his writer`s pen for the orange vest of a Prague road-sweeper. As he works, he meditates on Czechoslovakia, on Kafka, on life, on art and, obsessively, on his passionate and adulterous love affair with the sculptress
Flood
Flood is a devastating and compulsive thriller that reads like fact. The country has suffered floods on an unprecedented scale in recent years, but have we seen the worst, an inundation that threatens millions of lives? Doyle`s vision is incontestable, backed up by over twenty-five years of research. Flood is the disaster novel of today.
Marcovaldo
“Marcovaldo” is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite
The Trial
The terrifying tale of Joseph K, a respectable functionary in a bank, who is suddenly arrested and must defend his innocence against a charge about which he can get no information. A nightmare vision of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the mad agendas of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.
