Just one Cornetto is the delightful story of Keith and his wife Gail's six-month, 11,000-kilometre winter journey round Italy including Sicily and his love for cream or chocolate filled cornetti.Unsigned mountain roads, litter-filled city back streets, beautiful vistas, Greek temples, magical resorts, historical centres, generous locals met along the way all provide an engaging mix and invaluable insight into an out-of-season Italy. Who can resist encounters with Tony Blair's frien...

Keith’s wife Gail is looking forward to travelling the world and staying in comfortable hotels when Keith takes early retirement from his high-pressure job. But he has a shock in store for her. He unexpectedly decides to buy a huge American Winnebago-type motorhome (RV), tow a car behind ‘so they can bugger off for months on end around Europe’. Their only experience a brief episode 30 years earlier, when their VW pop-top blew up on a remote mountain road. Gail reveals her fear that anythin...

Just One Cornetto is the delightful story of Keith and his wife Gail’s six-month, 11,000-kilometre winter journey round Italy including Sicily and his love for cream or chocolate filled cornetti.Unsigned mountain roads, litter-filled city back streets, beautiful vistas, Greek temples, magical resorts, historical centres, generous locals met along the way all provide an engaging mix and invaluable insight into an out-of-season Italy. Who can resist encounters with Tony Blair’s frien...

CAMPERVAN CAPERSA Couple's First YearExploring the World of CampervanningWhat do you do when you've got itchy feet but don't want to uproot your life?Buy a campervan!At least, that's what this couple did.After a rather nomadic life, the author settles down with her partner in Cornwall, England. But, after a number of years, those itchy, old feet want to get on the move again.On a restless whim, the couple decide to buy a campervan. It tur...

In her previous books Chris tells of her move to the tiny Feudal Island of Sark, in the British Channel Isles with her husband Ken, to run their guest house and smallholding. They then journey out to New Zealand to explore and finally settle there. Over the years the marriage starts to falter and in the opening chapter of 'So You Returned to Sark' it comes to a dramatic head. Chris returns to Sark with 'the love of her life,' Peter, and begins a very different existence. She becomes involv...

London Book Festival Grand Prize Winner 2012‘I’d convinced her we should travel the world. She imagined posh flights and swanky hotels. Then I said the three words every girl longs to hear: Volkswagen camper van.’This frank and funny true story of a 'family gap year' like no other shows how the passing comment of a bored 9-year-old can snowball into an absurd expedition into strange lands, financial peril and some distinctly unsavoury living arrangements. With Stra...

"Oh, you live on a boat? That must be really cold in the winter. . ." Or, "Oh, you live on a boat? It must be great being so close to nature . . ." Or, "Oh, you live on a boat? It must be fantastic to be able to go wherever you like, whenever you like . . ."Narrow Escape sets out to dispel these commonly held public myths.From how to avoid assassination by ninja stealth ducklings, through definitive proof that kittens are aliens and the best way to sleep at forty-five degre...

One minute you're relaxing by the pool in a luxury Thai resort and the next you're a gringo with a donkey on an isolated island off Brazil!When Tony and his wife Sue were caught in the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami that devastated hundreds of thousands of lives, they wanted more than to return to the rat race of suburban life, they wanted to 'live the dream'. After careful consideration, or possibly in a moment of insanity, they decided that the dream was to run a guest house on a remote...

Chris tells of her years as a district nurse, first in London in the early sixties and then New Zealand in the late seventies. She tells of the rough living conditions in London, where we meet people like the solo mother dying of cancer and longing to give her children a good Christmas and the 90 year old blind lady who refuses a proposal of marriage. In New Zealand she has a large area, is on 24hour call as the only nurse and where most of the roads are not tar-seal. We meet the disfuncti...

Peace and tranquillity. For once nothing terrible is happening. After years of dodgy moorings, ankle-deep mud, exploding toilets and all the other normalities of live-aboard life, the Brownes now seem to have found the perfect spot in which to park Minerva, their aging narrowboat. Marie and family finally find the time to work on the outside of the boat and even take a holiday or two. It looks as though life has finally taken a turn toward 'normal'.Not a chance.From the bal...

Narrow Margins – a laugh-out-loud book which proves that lean times can sometimes be a very positive thing.Faced with the loss of everything following the collapse of the Rover Group, Marie Browne moved her long-suffering husband Geoff, chaotic children and smelly, narcoleptic dog on to a houseboat in search of a less stressful, healthier, alternative way of life.Strapped for cash, the family buy a decrepit 70ft barge called Happy Go lucky which had been run as a floating h...

After seven years of running their guest house and smallholding on the tiny feudal Island of Sark in the British Channel Islands, Chris and Ken Davies decided to have a two-year break.In 1972 they packed their suitcases and booked passage, with young son Roy,to New Zealand, calling at many exotic places en route.Arriving in Auckland, they bought a Bedford 18cwt delivery van and the three Davies set off to drive all over the two Islands, from Cape Reinga to Stewart Island, li...