Category Archives: Travel Guides
Strange Star
They were coming tonight to tell ghost stories. `A tale to freeze the blood,` was the only rule. Switzerland, 1816. On a stormy summer night, Lord Byron and his guests are gathered round the fire. Felix, their serving boy, can`t wait to hear their creepy tales. Yet real life is about to take a chilling
Climbing Days
In Climbing Days, Dan Richards is on the trail of his great-great-aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a prominent and pioneering mountaineer of the early twentieth century. For years, Dorothy and her husband, I. A. Richards, remained a mystery to Dan, but the chance discovery of her 1935 memoir leads him on a journey. Perhaps, in the mountains,
Under the Tump: Sketches of Real Life on the Welsh Borders
Hay-on-Wye is world famous as the Town of Books. But when travel writer Oliver Balch moved there, it was not just the books he was keen to read, but the people too. After living in London and Buenos Aires, what will he make of this tiny, quirky town on the Welsh-English border? To help guide
The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case
Pronounced guilty of libel and sentenced to a year in prison, novelist Emile Zola went on the run. Zola`s crime had been to defend a wrongly convicted man, in what became known as the Dreyfus Affair. Fleeing the French state with just hours to spare he ended up living in the suburbs of south London
The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland`s Border
Shortlisted for the 2018 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award`s Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the YearIn the wake of the EU referendum, the United Kingdom`s border with Ireland has gained greater significance: it is set to become the frontier with the European Union. To uncover its secret landscape, with a troubled past and an uncertain
Playing With Water: Alone on a Philippine Island
`One June day in 1953 aged twelve I sat in a classroom and drew a map.` The map that the young Hamilton-Paterson drew was of a tropical island, and it prefigured with uncanny accuracy the Philippine island on which, thirty years later, he would spend a full third of each year, entirely alone. It had
The Smell of Other People`s Houses
Alaska, 1970: growing up here is like nowhere else. Ruth wants to be remembered by her grieving mother. Dora wishes she was invisible to her abusive father. Alyce is staying at home to please her parents. Hank is running away for the sake of his brothers. Four very different lives are about to become entangled.
The Buried Giant
The extraordinary novel from the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize winning The Remains of the Day. The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But at least the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and
The News from Waterloo: The Race to Tell Britain of Wellington`s Victory
The Duke of Wellington`s victory over Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo ensured British dominance for the rest of the nineteenth century. It took three days and two hours for word to travel from Belgium in a form that people could rely upon. This is a tragi-comic midsummer`s tale that begins amidst terrible carnage and weaves
How to Paint a Dead Man
This is a Booker-longlisted novel of art, absence, loss and passion, from Britain`s most exciting contemporary writer. Moving between Italy and England, the lives of four people intertwine across half a century: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma; a blind girl tries to make sense of a
Towards the End of the Morning
Michael Frayn`s classic novel is set in the crossword and nature notes department of an obscure national newspaper during the declining years of Fleet Street, where John Dyson dreams wistfully of fame and the gentlemanly life – until one day his great chance of glory at last arrives. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of
The Russian Interpreter
The Russian Interpreter is a story about Raya, a mercurial Moscow blonde who speaks no English, and the affair she is embarking upon with Gordon Proctor-Gould, a visiting British businessman who speaks no Russian. They need an interpreter; which is how Paul Manning is diverted from writing his thesis at Moscow University to become involved
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
Eimear McBride`s debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman`s relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight
Rites of Passage
This is the first volume of William Golding`s Sea Trilogy. Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, sinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle
The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books
`Among the wealthy elders, my views gave some offence. Two or three people walked out of my lecture in Hamburg. At a dinner in Oldenburg I was seated next to a senior academic who berated me for my leftist leanings – not what he expected of an Oxford professor…` John Carey, best known for his
Fire Down Below: With an introduction by Victoria Glendinning
The third volume of William Golding`s Sea TrilogyA decrepit warship sails on the last stretch of its voyage to Sydney Cove. It has been blown off course and battered by wind, storm and ice. Little but rope holds the disintegrating hull together. And after a risky operation to reset its foremast, an unseen fire begins
Amnesia
When Gaby Bailleux released the Angel Worm into Australia`s prison system, allowing hundreds of asylum seekers to walk free, she also let the cat out of the bag. The Americans ran the prisons, like so many parts of her country, and so the doors of some 5000 American places of incarceration also opened. Both countries`
Close Quarters: With an introduction by Ronald Blythe
The second volume of William Golding`s Sea TrilogyIn a wilderness of heat, stillness and sea mists, a ball is held on a ship becalmed halfway to Australia. In this surreal, fete-like atmosphere the passengers dance and flirt, while beneath them thickets of weed like green hair spread over the hull. The sequel to Rites of
Darkness Visible
This title comes with an introduction by Philip Hensher. Darkness Visible opens at the height of the London Blitz, when a naked child steps out of an all-consuming fire. Miraculously saved but hideously scarred, soon tormented at school and at work, Matty becomes a wanderer, a seeker after some unknown redemption. Two more lost children
The Wall – Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize
Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize”Masterly… A signal achievement… Remarkable.” GuardianKavanagh begins his time patrolling the Wall.If he`s lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has to do two years of this. 729 more nights.The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and will never have to
