Travel Writing Memoirs

To celebrate her 50th birthday and face the challenges of midlife, Jane Christmas joins 14 women to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Despite a psychic's warning of catfights, death, and a sexy, fair-haired man, Christmas soldiers on. After a week of squabbles, the group splinters, and the real adventure begins. In vivid, witty style, she recounts her battles with loneliness, hallucinations of being joined by Steve Martin, as well as picturesque villages and even the fair-haired man.

Annette Joseph's years in Italy revealed this truth: Italy, in all its multifaceted, glorious history and culture has to be experienced in full. Over almost three decades, Italy has fed, entertained, confused, excited, lured, promised, lied, satisfied, occasionally disappointed, and utterly enchanted her. She's left, but can't stay away - she'll always return. Always. Just like a beloved partner....

Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi." His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

The history of Iceland began 1,200 years ago, when a frustrated Viking captain and his useless navigator ran aground in the middle of the North Atlantic. Suddenly, the island was no longer just a layover for the Arctic tern. Instead, it became a nation whose diplomats and musicians, sailors and soldiers, volcanoes and flowers, quietly altered the globe forever. How Iceland Changed the World takes readers on a tour of history, showing them how Iceland played a pivotal role in events as diverse as the French Revolution, the Moon Landing, and the foundation of Israel.

Gail Muller was told she’d be in a wheelchair by the age of 40. At 41, she set out to hike one of the world’s toughest treks: the Appalachian Trail - a 2,200-mile journey that would help her reclaim her life and heal her mind and body. An inspiring, moving, and uplifting memoir for fans of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.

From London to New York, Ewan and Charley chased their shadows through Europe, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, across the Pacific to Alaska, then down through Canada and America. But as the miles slipped beneath the tyres of their big BMWs, their troubles started. Exhaustion, injury and accidents tested their strength. Treacherous roads, unpredictable weather and turbulent politics challenged their stamina.

Fans of Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love will enjoy author Toby Neal's road trip travel memoir of self-discovery as she and her husband journey through the National Parks! I had a dream to live a "normal" life and I attained it; but along the way, I lost myself. My story began in Freckled: a Memoir of Growing up Wild in Hawaii, but it continued after I married the man of my dreams, completed my education with multiple degrees, had a successful career, and raised two beautiful children.

Writer for the New York Times and GQ, Mark Adams is also the acclaimed author of Mr. America. In this fascinating travelogue, Adams follows in the controversial footsteps of Hiram Bingham III, who’s been both lionized and vilified for his discovery of the famed Lost City in 1911—but which reputation is justified?

If you want to find an answer, where would you go? Google? Or maybe Quora? What if you were told that you could go on a life-changing journey to find the answers to some of the most important questions in life? Best-selling author Stuti Changle travels to 10 unique destinations across India and stumbles upon the answers to these questions that focus on finding purpose, health, work and relationships in life. Embark on this unique journey with Stuti in this audiobook. But while on this journey, you’d have to leave behind your phones and social media as she did to find the joy in missing out.

No one family has more experience of travelling together than the Whitehalls. Indeed they've been allowing us a window to their escapades for the past five years in the hit Netflix show Travels with My Father, and in this hilarious book, they have now decided to pool their advice for fellow travellers. To lay out the pitfalls of family holidays. The dos and don'ts, the highs and lows. In doing so, they are sharing some of their best anecdotes.

As one of the most celebrated cave divers in the world, Jill Heinerth has seen the planet in a way almost no one has. In a workday, she might swim below your home, through conduits in volcanoes or cracks in the world's largest iceberg. She's an explorer, a scientist's eyes and hands underwater - discovering new species and examining our finite freshwater reserves - and a filmmaker documenting the wonders of underwater life. Often the lone woman in a male-dominated domain, she tests the limits of human endurance at every tight turn, risking her life with each mission.

Whether navigating the backroads of Louisiana or Thuringia, exploring the snowy Quebec woods, or performing onstage at Rush concerts, Neil Peart has stories to tell. His first volume in this series, Far and Away, combined words and images to form an intimate, insightful narrative that won many fans. Now Far and Near brings together reflections from another three years of an artist's life.

Peter Mayle and his wife had been to Provence as tourists. They had dreamed of one day trading the long, grey winters and damp summers of England for the blue skies and sunshine of the coast of southern France. And then they made it happen. They moved into an old farmhouse at the foot of the Luberon mountains and embarked on a wonderful, if at times bewildering, new life.

This fun and inspiring story shows that it is never too late to fulfill a long held dream. For thirty years, Diane Covington-Carter dreamed of living in France and immersing herself in the country and language that spoke to her heart and soul.

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.

Best-selling and beloved author Frances Mayes discovers the hidden pleasures of Italy in a sumptuous travel narrative that crisscrosses the country, with inventive new recipes celebrating Italian cuisine.

Steinbeck and Capa's account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune.

After years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world's biggest races, Adharanand Finn set out to discover just what it was that made them so fast - and to see if he could keep up. Packing up his life he moved from Devon to Iten, in Kenya, to eat with, interview, sleep beside and - most importantly – run with, some of the greatest runners in the world. In the distance rests his dream, to join the best of the Kenyan athletes in an epic first marathon across the Kenyan plains.

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India", Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Calvin Trillin proves that he is one of America's funniest food writers, while recalling his efforts to write a definitive history of the Buffalo chicken wing to his attempts to lure his older daughter back from California by finding an irresistible bagel.