The Stubborn Light of Things - A Nature Diary by Melissa Harrison

$32.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

A nature diary by award-winning novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison, following her journey from urban south London to the rural Suffolk countryside. 'A writer of great gifts.' Robert Macfarlane 'A nature writer with a knowledge and eye for detail that recalls Thomas Hardy and John McGahern.' Th e Times When I lived in London I barely noticed the winter solstice. Nothing slowed, contracted or dimmed to mark the shortest day of the year, for, like all cities, London has all but left such trifling considerations behind. But now I am in Suffolk, and the difference could not be more marked. I wake in dim half-light, the yellow windows of nearby farmhouses glimmering across frost-white fields. At three the rooks begin to gather in the leafless trees, and flocks of starlings start to move from place to place. When darkness falls, the nights are blacker than I've ever seen, the starfield so breathtaking that Orion and the Plough are lost amid a million other points of light. The Stubborn Light of Things will transform the way you see the world. A Londoner for over twenty years, moving from flat to Tube to air-conditioned office, Melissa Harrison knew what it was to be insulated from the seasons. Adopting a dog and going on daily walks helped reconnect her with the cycle of the year and the quiet richness of nature all around her: swifts nesting in a nearby church; ivy-leaved toadflax growing out of brick walls; the first blackbird's song; an exhilarating glimpse of a hobby over Tooting Common. Moving from scrappy city verges to ancient, rural Suffolk, where Harrison eventually relocates, this diary - compiled from her beloved Nature Notebook column in The Times - maps her joyful engagement with the natural world and demonstrates how we must first learn to see, and then act to preserve, the beauty we have on our doorsteps - no matter where we live. A perceptive and powerful call-to-arms written in mesmerising prose, The Stubborn Light of Things confirms Harrison as a central voice in British nature writing. ...Show more

Where There's a Will - Hope, Grief and Endurance in a Cycle Race Across a Continent by Emily Chappell

$24.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

A London cycle courier with a taste for adventure, Emily Chappell entered an extraordinary new race - The Transcontinental - in which riders must find their own way, entirely unassisted, across Europe in the shortest time possible. On her second attempt, she won the women's event, covering nearly 4,000 miles in 13 days and 10 hours, sleeping in short bursts wherever exhaustion took her. In the aftermath of a win that troubled as much as pleased her she worked with Mike Hall, the founder of the race, until his tragic death on the road. Where There's a Will is a book about a normal person finding the capacity to do something extraordinary; the paradoxes of comradeship, competition, vulnerability and will and the shock of grief, combined in a beautifully written and very human story. ...Show more

The Virago Book of Women Travellers by Mary Morris

$39.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

'A volume in which rich and unexpected seams of precious materials await discovery' Guardian Three hundred years of wanderlust are captured in this collection as women travel for peril or pleasure, whether to gaze into Persian gardens or imbibe the French countryside, to challenge the fierce Sahara or c limb an impossible mountain. The extraordinary women in this collection are observers of the world in which they wander; their prose rich in description, remarkable in detail. Mary McCarthy conveys the vitality of Florence while Willa Cather's essay on Lavandou foreshadows her descriptions of the French countryside in later novels. Others are more active participants in the culture they are visiting, such as Leila Philip, as she harvests rice with Japanese women. Whether it is curiosity about the world, a thirst for adventure or escape from personal tragedy, all of these women are united in that they approached their journeys with wit, intelligence, compassion and empathy for the lives of those they encountered along the way. Also includes writing by Willa Cather, Joan Didion, Vita Sackville-West, M. F. K Fisher, Christina Dodwell and more. ...Show more

Impossible Owls - Essays from the Ends of the World by Brian Phillips

$29.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

From its opening journey into remote Alaska for the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, IMPOSSIBLE OWLS leads us on a kaleidoscopic exploration of contemporary reality. Brian Phillips takes us to a sumo tournament in Japan, the jungle in India, the studio of a great Russian animator, a royal tour of the Yukon Terri tory with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and into the weird heart of America. This exhilarating debut visits borders both real and imagined, and asks what it means, in our age, to travel to the end of the map. ...Show more

The Gran Tour: Travels with My Elders by Ben Aitken

$32.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ACCLAIMED A CHIP SHOP IN POZNAŃ One millennial, six coach trips, one big generation gap. When Ben Aitken learnt that his gran had enjoyed a four-night holiday including four three-course dinners, four cooked breakfasts, four games of bingo, a pair of excursions, sixteen pints of lager and luxury return coach travel, all for a hundred pounds, he thought, that's the life, and signed himself up. Six times over. Good value aside, what Ben was really after was the company of his elders - those with more chapters under their belt, with the wisdom granted by experience, the candour gifted by time, and the hard-earned ability to live each day like it's nearly their last. A series of coach holidays ensued - from Scarborough to St Ives, Killarney to Lake Como - during which Ben attempts to shake off his thirty-something blues by getting old as soon as possible. ...Show more

Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght

$48.00 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

When wildlife researcher Jonathan Slaght was a young Peace Corps volunteer in the Russian Far East, he caught a brief glimpse of a Blakiston's fish owl. It was the furthest south the species had been documented in over a hundred years, and a chance encounter that would change his life. In Owls of the E astern Ice, Slaght tells the story of his decades-long quest to safeguard the world's largest owl from extinction in Primorye, a remote Russian province dominated by Ussuri taiga forest, the only place in the world where brown bears, tigers and leopards co-exist. The fish owl lives exclusively along the rivers of Eastern Russia, Northeastern China, and Japan's Hokkaido Island, and can best be tracked in the winter snows, so very little is known about it. Now Russia's evolving fortunes, logging interests and climate change present new threats to the owl's survival. In this breath-taking nature and adventure story, Slaght recounts his experiences pursuing the owl through its forbidding territory, during months-long journeys covering thousands of miles, so that he and his fellow researchers can learn how to protect this endangered giant. Along the way he spends time with the Russians who inhabit the taiga and must survive in the harshest and most isolating of conditions. As much a portrait of the world's most extraordinary owl as of the Russian Far East itself, Owls of the Eastern Iceis a timely meditation on our relationship with the natural world and what it means to devote one's life to a single pursuit. ...Show more

The Frayed Atlantic Edge by David Gange

$27.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

'This is the book that has been wanting to be written for decades: the ragged fringe of Britain as a laboratory for the human spirit' Adam Nicolson Over the course of a year, leading historian and nature writer David Gange kayaked the weather-ravaged coasts of Atlantic Britain and Ireland from north to south: every cove, sound, inlet, island. The idea was to travel slowly and close to the water: in touch with both the natural world and the histories of communities on Atlantic coastlines. The story of his journey is one of staggering adventure, range and beauty. For too long, Gange argues, the significance of coasts has been underestimated, and the potential of small boats as tools to make sense of these histories rarely explored. This book seeks to put that imbalance right. Paddling alone in sun and storms, among dozens of whales and countless seabirds, Gange and his kayak travelled through a Shetland summer, Scottish winter and Irish spring before reaching Wales and Cornwall. Sitting low in the water, as did millions in eras when coasts were the main arteries of trade and communication, Gange describes, in captivating prose and loving detail, the experiences of kayaking, coastal living and historical discovery. Drawing on the archives of islands and coastal towns, as well as their vast poetic literatures in many languages, he shows that the neglected histories of these stunning regions are of real importance in understanding both the past and future of the whole archipelago. It is a history of Britain and Ireland like no other. ...Show more

A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier; Nicholas Thomas (Editor)

$30.00 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

The first great English-language travel book, A New Voyage Round the World (1697) is an incomparably vivid, chaotic and fascinating account by the pirate, explorer and naturalist William Dampier of his many adventures. The world he describes sprawls all the way from the Caribbean west across the Pacifi c to the Philippines and Southeast Asia - a vast expanse tied together by the Spanish Empire. Dampier and his men live lives of rascally precariousness, in the shadow of great Spanish galleons and fortresses, always on the verge of disaster. His book is filled with raids, escapes, wrecks and storms, but Dampier is also a great observer of animals, exotic foods, boats, customs: the book is a cornucopia of descriptions of everything from giant centipedes to bananas. It was originally designed simply to entertain and to be useful for later adventurers and merchants, but it is now a unique document, miraculously preserving glimpses of now long-vanished peoples and places. This new edition, introduced and annotated by Nicholas Thomas, makes clear Dampier's key role as a proselytiser for the early British Empire, as an inspiration for generations of naturalist and explorers, and as a uniquely curious character. ...Show more

To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War & Peace by Kapka Kassabova

$39.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two vast lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's past, and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmothe r's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a civilisational crossroads. The Lakes are set within the mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and crowned by the old Roman road, the via Egnatia. Once a trading and spiritual nexus of the southern Balkans, this lake region remains one of Eurasia's most culturally diverse areas. Meanwhile, with their remote rock churches, changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the Lakes live in their own time. By exploring on water and land the stories of poets, fishermen, and caretakers, misfits, rulers, and inheritors of war and exile, Kassabova uncovers the human history shaped by the Lakes. Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy of the Lakes, Kassabova's journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change. ...Show more

Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir by Agatha Christie

$34.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

Agatha Christie's personal memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan, where she worked on the digs and wrote some of her most evocative novels. Think you know Agatha Christie? Think again! To the world she was Agatha Christie, legendary author o f bestselling whodunits. But in the 1930s she wore a different hat, travelling with her husband, renowned archaeologist Max Mallowan, as he investigated the buried ruins and ancient wonders of Syria and Iraq. When friends asked what this strange 'other life' was like, she decided to answer their questions by writing down her adventures in this eye-opening book. Described by the author as a 'meandering chronicle of life on an archaeological dig', Come, Tell Me How You Live is Agatha Christie's very personal memoir of her time spent in this breathtaking corner of the globe, living among the working men in tents in the desert where recorded human history began. Acclaimed as 'a pure pleasure to read', it is an altogether remarkable and increasingly poignant narrative, a fascinating, vibrant and vivid portrait of everyday life in a world now long since vanished. ...Show more

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris by John Baxter

$26.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing | Reading Level: very good

Thrust into the unlikely role of professional "literary walking tour" guide, an expat writer provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of Paris in years.In this enchanting memoir, acclaimed author and long-time Paris resident John Baxter remembers his yearlong experience of giving "literar y walking tours" through the city. Baxter sets off with unsuspecting tourists in tow on the trail of Paris's legendary artists and writers of the past. Along the way, he tells the history of Paris through a brilliant cast of characters: the favorite cafes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce; Pablo Picasso's underground Montmartre haunts; the bustling boulevards of the late-nineteenth-century flâneurs; the secluded "Little Luxembourg" gardens beloved by Gertrude Stein; the alleys where revolutionaries plotted; and finally Baxter's own favorite walk near his home in Saint-Germain-des-Pres.Paris, by custom and design, is a pedestrian's city-each block a revelation, every neighborhood a new feast for the senses, a place rich with history and romance at every turn. The Most Beautiful Walk in the World is your guide, par excellence, to the true, off-the-beaten-path heart of the City of Lights. ...Show more

Discover and Explore the Chatham IslandsFirst to See the Sun by Cherry Lawrie

$62.00 NZD

Category: Travel Writing