Travel Memoir

In the spring of 2021, as the UK's latest pandemic lockdowns were lifted, Nick Butter set out from the Eden Project to become the fastest person to cover every mile of Britain's mainland coastline on foot. Battling the most extreme winds Britain had seen in 100 years, days of torrential rain and the unrelenting hills of Western Scotland and Cornwall, Nick suffered two broken bones and countless injuries, whilst taking on two marathons a day, every day, for 100 days.

Dodging secret police on the daily, and haggling prices for dried fruit and vintage leathers in heroin-laced bazaars, My Kazakhy is filled with all the gems you wouldn't expect to find from a queer Latino boy serving in the Peace Corps in a third world, Muslim country.

At the age of 17, in a last-minute twist of fate, Laura Bradbury is sent to Burgundy, France, for a year’s exchange. She arrives knowing only a smattering of French and with no idea what to expect in her first foray out of North America. With a head full of dreams and a powerful desire to please, Laura quickly adapts to Burgundian life, learning crucial skills such as the fine art of wine tasting and how to savor snails.

Like her 2011 book of a similarly-epic long trek around Lake Michigan, this grand hike on the shores of five magnificent bodies of freshwater explores the natural and human history of the Great Lakes, while raising important questions about preserving our wild places and protecting fragile ecosystems on which we all depend.

Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of work, Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances, from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life and his restless and ever-curious mind.

Adventurer Sylvain Tesson has led a restless life, riding across Central Asia on horseback, freeclimbing the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, and traversing the Himalayas by foot. But while recovering from an accident that left him in a coma, and nursing his wounds from a lost love, he found himself domesticated, his lust for life draining with each moment spent staring at a screen. An expedition to the mountains of Tibet, in search of the famously elusive snow leopard, presented itself as a cure.

A Zoo in My Luggage is the colorful, first-hand account of Gerald Durrell's six-month animal-collecting trip in British Cameroon, and his attempts to create his own zoo. Motivated by a passion for wildlife, and a desire to save endangered species from extinction, Durrell assembles a glorious panoply of exotic animals - including a female baboon called Georgina, who later runs amok in a department store; a black-eared squirrel, who tries to bury nuts in his ear; and a gentlemanly chimpanzee named Chumly, who greets him with an outstretched hand.

After Kim and her husband, Brian, decide to quit their jobs to travel around the world, they're given a yellow envelope containing a check and instructions to give the money away. There are only three rules for the envelope: don't overthink it, share your experiences, and don't feel pressured to give it all away. Through Ecuador, Peru, Nepal, and beyond, Kim and Brian face obstacles, including major challenges to their relationship.

The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche as the ultimate Otherland in a world otherwise fully mapped and traversed. Erling Kagge and his friend Børge Ousland became the first people “to ever reach the pole without dogs, without depots and without motorized aids,” skiing for 58 days from a drop off point on the ice edge of Canada’s northernmost island. With magnificent prose, Erling takes us along for his historical journey, examining the psychological motivations for going on this epic expedition.

As a journalist, author, and founding member of the trail-blazing band Rheostatics, Dave Bidini has had the privilege to explore Canada's immense geography. Yet, in all his many travels, he'd never visited the Northwest Territories. After an all-too-brief visit to a literary festival in Yellowknife, Bidini was hooked on the place and its people. When he returned home, all he could do was think about going back to the North.

Lin and Larry Pardey's first book, Cruising in Seraffyn, is credited with launching 50,000 dreams. This third book in the critically-acclaimed Seraffyn series chronicles their three years spent exploring Ulysses' wine-colored sea.

Imagine a young doctor, trained in the latest medical knowledge and state-of-the-art equipment, suddenly transported back to one of the world’s most isolated and unforgiving environments - Nome, Alaska. That’s what happen to Dr. Sims. His plans to become a pediatric surgeon were drastically changed when, on the eve of being drafted into the army to serve as a MASH surgeon in Vietnam, he was offered a commission in the US Public Health for assignment in Anchorage, Alaska, where he was scheduled to act as chief of pediatrics at the Alaska Native Medical Center.

Her entire life, Anne Friedman chased everything that society told her she should want: Marriage. Professional achievement. Thighs that didn’t touch. But all that got her was depression, anxiety, and disordered eating. When her fiancé dumps her without explanation, she buys a one-way ticket to Costa Rica in search of answers.

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake.

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.

On 8 August 1914, five days after the outbreak of World War One, the Endurance, a wooden-hulled, coal-fired icebreaker, set sail for the South Pole, in a bid to complete the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition, which would cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to Scott's base at Cape Evans, via the Pole. However, despite the best planning, the ship succumbs to the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, and is subjected to months of uncontrollable drifting before its crew makes a scramble for Elephant Island, where they battle constant cold and starvation.

In Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, Kate Whouley strips away the romantic veneer of mother-daughter love to bare the toothed and tough reality of caring for a parent who is slowly losing her mind. Yet, this is not a dark or dour look at the demon of Alzheimer’s. Whouley shares the trying, the tender, and the sometimes hilarious moments in meeting the challenge also known as Mom.

In this intimate dual memoir, she and her daughter, Ann, offer distinct perspectives as a 50-something and a 20-something, each on a quest to redefine herself and to rediscover each other. Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel throughout Greece and France. Sue, coming to grips with aging, caught in a creative vacuum, longing to reconnect with her grown daughter, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel.

Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a heavy Russian carriage and set out on a difficult journey to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, down the Baltic coast to Prussia, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France that was then experiencing the tumultuous events of Napoleon's return from Elba.

This is an incredible story of adventure, human ingenuity, persistence, and resilience that shows firsthand what it is to adventure as a woman in the most dangerous of circumstance, what it is to be truly alone in the wild, and why someone would challenge themselves with an expedition others would call crazy. For Marquis, her story is about freedom, being alive and wild by nature.