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Right in the heart of Asia, where Britain, Russia and China stretched encroaching fingers towards a possible meeting, lies the mysterious tract of country passed over in half a page in our geography books, and omitted, except in vague and general outline, from our atlases. It is a region about which people have inquired little. North and South have been eagerly explored; the Pole and Sahara are brought, so to speak, to our doors. But the centuries have passed with but few at tempts to penetrate the core of the mysterious East. There is something about the very name of Khotan, of the Pamirs, of Mus-tagh-ata, which tickles the imagination, and we confess to something of a superstitious thrill in opening Dr. Sven Hedins book. For if the hidden Lama is to be unveiled, surely we have a right to expect portents. But what do we find? That Dr. Hedin visited the Temple of the Ten Thousand Images and " had tea " with the " Living Buddha! " Yet that was a mere incident, disposed of in a few lines of a book whose every page is alive with serious interest. Dr. Hedin has plenty of humour, and of good humour, but his book is one to be taken seriously. He has traversed thousands of miles where no European had ever before set foot; his adventures and experiences have been in themselves extraordinary, and his discoveries of far-reaching importance; but perhaps the charm of the book lies, as much as anywhere else, in the writers art of telling his story simply and unaffectedly and of keeping the warm human interest alive from first to last. There is hardly a more fascinating or a more thrilling travel book. The descriptions of the various attempts to scale the Mus-tagh-ata, of the wonderful scenic effects, of the mental and physical sensations of the traveller, and the grand invincibility of the Father of the Ice Mountains, are enough to set the nerves a-tingling in the bare reading.

Right in the heart of Asia, where Britain, Russia and China stretched encroaching fingers towards a possible meeting, lies the mysterious tract of country passed over in half a page in our geography books, and omitted, except in vague and general outline, from our atlases. It is a region about which people have inquired little. North and South have been eagerly explored; the Pole and Sahara are brought, so to speak, to our doors. But the centuries have passed with but few at tempts to penetrate the core of the mysterious East. There is something about the very name of Khotan, of the Pamirs, of Mus-tagh-ata, which tickles the imagination, and we confess to something of a superstitious thrill in opening Dr. Sven Hedins book. For if the hidden Lama is to be unveiled, surely we have a right to expect portents. But what do we find? That Dr. Hedin visited the Temple of the Ten Thousand Images and " had tea " with the " Living Buddha! " Yet that was a mere incident, disposed of in a few lines of a book whose every page is alive with serious interest. Dr. Hedin has plenty of humour, and of good humour, but his book is one to be taken seriously. He has traversed thousands of miles where no European had ever before set foot; his adventures and experiences have been in themselves extraordinary, and his discoveries of far-reaching importance; but perhaps the charm of the book lies, as much as anywhere else, in the writers art of telling his story simply and unaffectedly and of keeping the warm human interest alive from first to last. There is hardly a more fascinating or a more thrilling travel book. The descriptions of the various attempts to scale the Mus-tagh-ata, of the wonderful scenic effects, of the mental and physical sensations of the traveller, and the grand invincibility of the Father of the Ice Mountains, are enough to set the nerves a-tingling in the bare reading.

The socalled Sino-Swedish Expedition was a bilateral undertaking led by Sven Hedin that conducted scientific research in northern and northwestern China from 1927 to 1935. The expedition was particularly concerned with the meteorology, topography, and prehistory of Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and Xinjiang. Chiang Kai-shek was one of the patrons of the expedition. In the years 1927-32 the party travelled from Beijing via Baotou, Mongolia, Gobi Desert, Xinjiang to Urumqi. Some of the adventures of these years are described in this book, that was originally published in 1931.

A detailed account of the journey from Trebizond to Quetta. The route took Hedin through Erzerum, skirted Mount Ararat to Etchmiadzin and Nakichevan (the grave of Noah), and thence by Tabriz and Kasvin to Teheran, where the first part of his journey ended. The second part took him to Nasratabad in Seistan; the third to Quetta, where he may be said to have reached India . . . . The two volumes in which it is recorded contain a vast deal more than is above indicated. There are many digressions (from the bare record of travel) , some of which will not appeal to the general reader, whose interest is chiefly confined to the tale of travel, but many of them will command the attention of geographers and experts . . . . To mention a few, there are notes about Marco Polos travels, about the Euphrates, Mesopotamia and Nineveh, chapters on travels in the Kavir, on the march of Alexander the Great, on post-glacial climatic changes in Persia, on the distribution of desert and on the plague. This is volume one out of two.

A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The ImmeasurableWorld and The Moor.Breathtakingly good . . . Exiles is completely sui generis.EDMUND DE WAALAtkins spins a marvellous tapestry of colourful tales, beautifully weaving history and travel accounts.ANDREA WULF, author of The Invention of NatureA volume for our times.SARA WHEELER, THE SPECTATORThis is the story of three unheralded nineteenth-century dissidents, whose lives were profoundly shaped by the winds of empire, nationalism and autocracy that continue to blow strongly today: Louise Michel, a leader of the radical socialist government known as the Paris Commune; Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, an enemy of British colonialism in Zululand; and Lev Shternberg, a militant campaigner against Russian tsarism.In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment - Michels New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulus St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternbergs Sakhalin off the Siberian coast - in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home.Occupying the fertile zone where history, biography and travel writing meet, Exiles is a masterpiece of imaginative empathy.A fascinating study of exile and its effects.OBSERVER[Atkins] is humane, humble, and empathetic . . . beautiful and moving.ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in OdessaAn incredible, brilliant act of retrieval.PHILIP HOARE, author of Albert & the WhaleThrilling.FINANCIAL TIMESA finely crafted and lyrical meditation.TLSGracefully written . . . Brilliant.THE ECONOMISTRarely has a book been more timely.HISTORY TODAY***Read The Moor and The Immeasureable World for more award-winning writing from William Atkins

Lose yourself in the definitive collection of glorious travel sketchesby our centurys best loved voyager and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu.Depicts the brio of Durrells existence with intoxicating vividness.New York TimesMuch more than just a chronicle of his travels ... Reveals Durrells honesty, outspokenness, warmth, and extreme sensitivity to people and to the beauty of nature ... Unusual and fascinating.Library JournalExcellent, vigorous, exciting, unselfconscious, with a lively, original vocabulary ... Shot through with strength and vitality.TLSFrom the moment of his birth, Lawrence Durrell was far from home. A British child in India, he was sent to England to receive an education, and by his early twenties had already tired of his native land. With family in tow, he departed for Greece, and spent the rest of his life wandering the world. He traveled not to sight-see but to live, and made homes in Egypt, France, Yugoslavia, and Argentina. Each time he landed, he rooted himself deep into the native soil, taking in not just the sights and sounds of his new land, but the essential character of the country. In this definitive collection of glorious letters and essays, Durrell exhibits the power of poetic observation that made his travel writing so extraordinary.

This work, composed of "Letters to a Friend," is the story of a merry archaeological journey. The form is a familar one, but it displays remarkable erudition. It is the chat of a witty savant who takes us from Aix-la-Chapelle to Cologne, and from Mainz to Frankfort, visiting all the monuments, recounting legends of towns, castles and hamlets, allowing himself to wander off into philosophic digressions, to indulge in picturesque recitals filled with incidents and surprises, and interspersed with serious or comic reflections. There are also prophetic pages in this book, and one cannot too much meditate upon some of the affirmations of Victor Hugo.

Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage is, as Robert Macfarlane says in his introduction, one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a place that has ever been carried out. That place is one of the most mysterious and oldest inhabited landscapes in the world, the islands of Aran off the west coast of Ireland. Tim Robinsons epic exploration of the desolate, storm-lashed, limestone rocks, which have already haunted generations of Irish writers, takes the form of a clockwise journey around the coast. Every cliff, inlet and headland reveals layers of myth and historical memory, and Robinson makes beautifully crafted observations about the habits of birds, plants and the humans who lived there and endured, leaving records in stone - on the walls, cairns and ancient forts - in story and in oral tradition.

An enthralling, elegant, emotional account of a journey into exile, by the wonderful TeffiMoscow, 1918. Following the Revolution, people are leaving the city in droves - bound for the Black Sea, and from there to Europe and beyond. In late autumn, the celebrated writer Teffi is invited on a reading tour; having elegantly navigated the bureaucratic waters for her visa, she spends the winter travelling from Moscow to Kiev, and from there to Odessa and on to Novorossisk, first by train and then by ship. On the shores of the Black Sea, as Spring arrives, Teffi is advised to go abroad for a time, until things have settled down in Russia. She reluctantly agrees, not fully realising that this would be the beginning of her permanent exile from her beloved country.The great Teffis memoir of her last months in Russia is, for all its melancholy, marked by her characteristic wit, sense of irony and generosity of spirit. Her descriptions of her journey across two thousand miles of Russia, during which she encounters illness, hardship and sorrow in the company of a multitude of refugees, are almost unbearably moving at times - but also irresistibly vivid, and utterly unforgettable.Teffi (1872-1952) wrote poems, plays, stories, satires and feuilletons, and was renowned in Russia for her wit and powers of observation. Following her emigration in 1919 she settled in Paris, where she became a leading figure in the migr literary scene. Now her genius has been rediscovered by a new generation of readers, and she once again enjoys huge acclaim in Russia and across the world. Her short-story collection Subtly Worded is also published by Pushkin Press, and the non-fiction collection Rasputin and Other Ironies will also be published in May 2016.

In 2013 Ian Crofton undertook a journey he had been pondering for years: a walk along the Border between Scotland and England. It would be an exploration both of his own identity - not quite Scottish, not quite English - and of a largely unexplored stretch of country. Apart from the line marked on the map, the route is not obvious. For much of its length the Border either follows the middle of various rivers, or traces the Southern Upland watershed, an area of bleak moorland and dense conifer plantations. During the course of his walk, Ian Crofton investigates the history, literature and legend of the Border. He talks to a range of people he comes across - farmers, landladies, bar staff, anglers, labourers, shepherds, shopkeepers - to find out what they make of the Border, if anything at all. Such conversations lead to a consideration of the very nature of borders. Do they provide a necessary defence of the nationstate? Or are they, in this day and age, an affront to global justice? Walking the Border is in the best traditions of travel writing, combining vivid description with human insight, the whole spiced with a wry sense of the absurdity and necessity of both inward and outward journeys.

Walking To America follows and recreates the immense journey, in search of a new life and of a miracle doctor who could cure the blindness of one of their number. The journey was taken largely on foot by a small working-class family unit from England in the 1880s, to Liverpool, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and back again. Written as travelogue and as a history of one of the great neglected subjects - the New World immigrants who returned home to the Old, Walking to America is a personal tale, full of characterisation and human stories, based upon received lore, followed footsteps and careful historical research.An epic, covering thousands of miles and cultures and environments as diverse as the Victorian UK coalfields, the great imperial entrepot of Liverpool, the post-bellum American south, roaring 1880s New Orleans, the stew of the free-for-all Pittsburgh mines, Texas in the wake of the Alamo, the unclaimed Indian Territory of North America and the ultimate frontier of the Petrified Forest in Arizona - all seen through the eyes of a small group of identifiable and sympathetic, real and ordinary men, women and children from the north-east of England. Walking to America is a great and gripping adventure of discovery, hope and loss. And it is all true.

In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards theYorkshire village where he was born.Travelling as a modern troubadour without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep. WALKING HOME describes this extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey. Its a story about Britains remote and overlooked interior - the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his journey. Its about facing emotional and physical challenges, and sometimes overcoming them. Its nature writing, but with people at its heart. Contemplative, moving and droll, it is a unique narrative from one of our most beloved writers.

Now available as an ebook, the original classic in which P.J. ORourke takes on the role of tour guide with hilarious results P.J. ORourke travels to hellholes around the globe in Holidays in Hell, looking for trouble, the truth, and a good time. After casually sight-seeing in war-torn Lebanon and being pepper-gassed in Korea, P.J. checks out the night life in communist Poland and spends the Christmas holidays in El Salvador. Taking a long look at Nicaragua, P.J. asks, "Is Nicaragua a Bulgaria with marimba bands or just a misunderstood Massachusetts with Cuban military advisors?"; has a close encounter with a Philippine army officer he describes as "powerful-looking in a short, compressed way, like an attack hamster"; and concludes, "Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. Im worried about the difference between wrong and fun."The first few pages of this book made me laugh so much I dropped it on my month-old baby... Holidays in Hell is a splendid read.Evening Standard

Lose yourself in this vivid travelogue evoking the historic Mediterranean island of Sicily by the king of travel writing and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu.A magician.The TimesDespite decades spent poetically chronicling Mediterranean life in Rhodes, Cyprus and Corfu, celebrated travel writer Lawrence Durrell had never set foot on the largest island: Sicily. For years, his friend Martine begged him to visit her on this sun-kissed paradise, but it took her sudden death to finally bring him to its shores - and he is not disappointed. Joining an eccentric tour group, Durrell immerses himself in the islands spectacular archaeological remains, and becomes dizzy with Sicilys rich history: its mysterious myths and meanings. Featuring unpublished poems and illustrated with elegant engravings. Sicilian Carousel is a gem that ranks with Durrells finest work.Readers who have been to Sicily will love this book. Readers who have not been to Sicily will love this book.Paul Fussell Like long letters from a civilized and very funny friend - the prose as luminous as the Mediterranean air he loves.Time

Seven-Tenths is James Hamilton-Patersons classic exploration of the sea. A beautifully-written blend of literature and science, it is here brought back into print in a revised and updated edition which includes the acclaimed essay Sea Burial.

In a wonderfully evocative collection of her travel writing and reportage from over five decades, Jan Morris - a constant traveller - has produced a unique portrait of the twentieth century. Ranging from New York to Venice, Sydney to Berlin, and the Middle East to South Africa, Jan Morris was a witness to such seminal moments as the Eichmann trial, the first ascent of Everest, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the handover of Hong Kong.Offering a tremendously perceptive and highly personal view of the world, she is as much concerned with conveying the feel of these moments as the events themselves. And, as ever, she displays her unique and inimitable literary style, at once funny, wise and sad. Jan Morriss collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Venice, Coronation Everest, Hong Kong, Spain, Manhattan 45, A Writers World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy.Hav, her novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.A glorious compendium of adventure and wisdom Pico Iyer

Europe has been widely acclaimed as among the finest achievements of one of our greatest living writers (The Times). A personal appreciation, fuelled by five decades of journeying, this is Jan Morris at her best - at once magisterial and particular, whimsical and profound. It is a matchless portrait of a continent.

Renowned and much-loved travel writer Jan Morris turns her eye to Sydney: not the best of the cities the British Empire created ... but the most hyperbolic, the youngest at heart, the shiniest.Sydney takes us on the citys journey from penal colony to world-class metropolis, as lively and charming as the city it describes. With characteristic exuberance and sparkling prose, Jan Morris guides us through the history, people and geography of a fascinating and colourful city. Jan Morriss collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Venice, Hong Kong, Spain, Manhattan 45,A Writers World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy. Hav, her novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Sydney should be flattered. A great portrait painter has chosen it for her recent subject . . . Few writers - a handful of novelists apart - have got so far under the citys skin as Morris . . . Few Sydneysiders could match her knowledge of their citys history and its anecdotesThe TimesThe writing is, at times, like surfing: sentences rise like vast waves above which she rides, never overbalancing into gush . . . Jan Morris convincingly explains modern Sydney through its historyObserver

Fresh from her successful scoop reporting the first ascent of Everest in 1953, Jan Morris spent a year journeying across the United States, by car, train, ship and aeroplane. In herwords a "period piece", Coast to Coast describes an American identity markedly different from today. In her brilliant prose, Morris records with exuberence and curiosity a time of innocence in the US - when television was in its infancy, the Big Mac had not been invented and the popular song of the day was "Chattanooga Choo-Choo".

This guide to the forgotten stones of early ecclesiastical sites and buildings is a lovingly detailed record of 82 churches secreted in the hundred-odd square miles of the Burren, a primeval limestone region of north County Clare, one heavily populated, encapsulating Irelands Christian heritage. The physical remains and state or preservation of each church are carefully described, as are features of archaeological and historic interest altars, bullauns, carvings, crosses, sheela-na-gigs, wells and accretions of legend and tradition. Over 120 photographs, a map and drawings, speak eloquently of the riches and reversals of a millennium of worship, remarkably concentrated in this luminous, compelling landscape.