Travel Memoir

Explorer is the story of what first led Benedict Allen to head for the farthest reaches of our planet - at a time when there were still valleys and ranges known only to the remote communities who inhabited them. It is also the story of why, 30 years later, he is still exploring. It's the story of a journey back to a clouded mountain in New Guinea to find a man called Korsai who had once been a friend, and to fulfil a promise made as young men. It is also a story of what it is to be 'lost' and 'found'.

A wisdom-filled memoir that doubles as a sweeping travelogue reaching from Boston to Sardinia and back again. Gorgeously written and culturally astute. The Boston Globe. When a big-city journalist quits her dream job to move to a remote Italian island for love, she discovers a whole new life beyond the romantic fantasies of Italy spun by books and movies. Struggling to adapt to a different culture, she buys a quirky house in the Sardinian countryside, goes to art school and becomes obsessed with home improvement and renovation.

Triggered by his increasing wanderlust after finishing his A-levels, Dominik Trottier set off to walk the Way of Saint James in April 2012. In his literary debut, Ultreya on the Camino, the author documents his experiences and numerous encounters that he had along the 800-kilometer pilgrimage track through the north of Spain. Due to a shattered dream of his, he also found himself dealing with many unsettled questions that he hoped to seek out the right answers for.

‘Have kids, will travel’ is veteran travel journalist Kate’s mantra. Her intrepid spirit is infectious in this warm, engaging account of her family’s adventures and misadventures. She shares the life lessons learnt on their travels, from overcoming disappointment in Thailand to saying sorry in Japan, discovering perseverance in Borneo and learning about conservation in Malaysia.

With yet-unhealed wounds from recent combat in southeast Asia, John Moore undertook an unexpected walking tour in the rugged Scottish Highlands. With a season of freezing rainstorms approaching, he took shelter in a remote monastery. This chance encounter would change his future, his beliefs about blind chance, and the unexpected courses by which the best in human nature can smuggle its way into the life of a stranger.

In Polish: This is a story about the journey of two brothers who travelled through the largest river in the world on...bikes. But not ordinary bikes - they were "Amazonian” bikes. The story is as bodacious as the trip itself, which seemed like an unachievable madness, but turned out to be a great adventure and a valuable life lesson. For one of its heroes it was a dream come true, for another the last chance for salvation. The book is written by Piotr Chmieliński - the first person on Earth who sailed through the Amazon River in a kayak.

Nick Bullock is a climber who lives in a small, green van, flitting between Llanberis, Wales, and Chamonix in the French Alps. Tides, Nick’s second work, is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Echoes. Tides is a gripping memoir that captures the very essence of what it means to dedicate one’s life to climbing.

In November 2015 Sarah Outen completed her five-year, 25,000 mile journey looping the planet by cycling across Europe, Asia and North America and canoeing and kayaking across the North Pacific and most of the North Atlantic.

Like Jack Kerouac’s intrepid little sister, Ariel Gore spins the spirited story of a vulnerable drifter who takes refuge in fate and the shadowy recesses of a string of glittering, broken relationships. With just a few pennies and her I Ching, a change of clothes and a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, a perceptive, searching 16-year-old Gore makes her way from the sterile suffocation of the Silicon Valley through the labyrinthine customs of Cold-War China, wanders through bustling, electric Kathmandu, and hunkers down in an icy London squat with a prostitute and a boyfriend on the dole.

Three years into a financial crisis that shows no sign of loosening its grip, a young couple make the unpopular decision to teach English in Saudi Arabia. The choice of Saudi Arabia is based primarily on the best salary offer and an all-expenses-paid round trip flight. Secondarily, it is to satiate a desire to explore a country steeped in mystery and taboo. Little do they know that the experience will come with a price and change their lives in a profound way.

In June 1944, the Nazis locked 18-year-old Dave Hersch into a railroad boxcar and shipped him from his hometown of Dej, Hungary, to Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the harshest, cruellest camp in the Reich. After 10 months in the granite mines of Mauthausen's nearby sub-camp, Gusen, he weighed less than 80 lbs., nothing but skin and bones. As Allied forces drew near Dave was forced to join a death march to Gunskirchen Concentration Camp, over 30 miles away. Soon after the start of the march, and more dead than alive, Dave summoned a burst of energy he did not know he had and escaped.

Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author presents “a celebration of all things country music” (Ken Burns) as she reflects on her search for the first family of Black country music.

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Orwell, like many other European socialists, was quick to join the fight against fascism. And so, in December that year, he found himself in Catalonia with a 40-year-old rifle, no helmet, uniform, maps or tools, and a platoon of near children under his command.

In 1975, seven-year-old Doina Cornell left England with her father Jimmy Cornell, mother and brother to spend the next six years sailing around the world on a small yacht. The author has drawn on her memories, diaries and stories, to re-create the perfect life led by a sailing child: swimming, diving and playing the days away in deserted anchorages; visiting some of the most beautiful islands in the world; falling in love with the sea in all its ever-changing moods, from balmy trade wind ocean passages to the treacherous breakers that crash onto tropical reefs.

The Roman Forum, the Leaning Tower, the Piazza San Marco: these are the sights synonymous with Italy. But such landmarks only scratch the surface of this magical country's offerings. In See You in the Piazza, Frances Mayes introduces us to the Italy only the locals know, as she and her husband, Ed, eat and drink their way through all 20 regions - from Friuli to Sicily. Along the way, she seeks out the cultural and historic gems not found in traditional guidebooks.

After a shocking diagnosis for a rare pituitary disease, and with her eighteen-year marriage in shambles, Risa's life has fallen far from picture-perfect. Recovering from brain surgery and desperate to get back to her former self, she signs up for the bike tour of a lifetime-six weeks from Canada to Mexico on the Pacific Coast Highway. The old Risa could have done the ride in her sleep, but for the new Risa, trapped in a body that no longer feels like her own and stuck in the company of her brain tumor, Bubba, the ride becomes a challenge unlike anything she's ever faced.

Within weeks of arriving as a volunteer in a remote corner of South America, Crawford got a lot more than he bargained for: a narrow escape from a kidnapping plot hatched by the people he was sent there to help. Then things only got stranger.

Shaken by the loss of her father, drained by her job at the United Nations, and conflicted over failed relationships, Natasha Scripture asked herself the question at the heart of her anxiety: What is my purpose? The answer was not about finding love; it was about recognizing its source. The result is Man Fast, a true and intimate spiritual detective story. With courage, honesty, and wit, Natasha shares the story of her awakening.

In this moving, tender memoir of losing a beloved spouse, the longtime editor of Texas Monthly, newly widowed, returns alone to a city whose enchantment he's only ever shared with his wife, in search of solace, memories, and the courage to find a way forward.

In 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott went back to the huge frozen wasteland of the Antarctic with the intention of reaching the South Pole, by a long and terribly arduous trek across the ice. On finally reaching the pole, Scott and his comrades were devastated to find that they had been beaten by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. With temperatures of minus 30, they began their slow journey back to their base.