"A winning blend of travelogue and literary biography" by a British journalist who travels the journey Agatha Christie once did from London to Iraq. ( Entertainment Weekly)With her marriage to her first husband over, Agatha Christie decided to take a much needed holiday; the Caribbean had been her intended destination, but a conversation at a dinner party with a couple who had just returned from Iraq changed her mind. Five days later she was off on a comple...

The Danube is Europe's Amazon. It flows through more countries than any other river on Earth - from the Black Forest in Germany to Europe's farthest fringes, where it joins the Black Sea in Romania. Andrew Eames' journey along its length brings us face to face with the Continent's bloodiest history and its most pressing issues of race and identity.As he travels - by bicycle, horse, boat and on foot - Eames finds himself seeking a bed for the night with minor royalty, hitching a rid...

No. 1 bestseller and superstar doing what he does best, introducing millions of avid readers to little-known peoples and places.Until the early 1990s, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, travelling behind the iron curtain was never easy. In undertaking his new journey through Eastern Europe, breathing in its rich history, and exquisite sights and talking to its diverse peoples, Michael fills what has been a void in his own experience and that of very many othe...

'The pace of this kind of travel has not much changed since Fogg set out in 1872. Trains may be a little faster, but there are certainly no high-speed rail links yet across India, China or the USA. Passenger services have practically disappeared from the world's shipping lanes ... Recourse to air travel, even as a convenient means of escape, was not allowed.'Following the route taken by Phileas Fogg 115 years earlier, Michael Palin set out from the Reform Club to circumnavigate the...

Way to Go brings together two epic motorcycle journeys, from Delhi to Belfast on a Royal Enfield, and from Chicago to LA on a Harley-Davidson.A thoughtful, hilarious, off-beat travelogue by award-winning journalist Geoff Hill.What the critics say about Geoff Hill’s travel writing‘Shift your arse Kerouac, Geoff Hill’s on the road. Faster, funnier, and still alive.’Colin Bateman‘…a distinctive brand of travel journalism that manages to combine side-spl...

One of the most successful, influential and acclaimed travel books of recent years from the author of ‘Return of a King’, which has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize.At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexp...

I had thought for some time that there must be something funny about Germany because, except for hard-drinking types at the Munich beer festival, I had never heard of anybody going there for a holiday. This was, in my view, the first of two advantages. There are travellers who, when abroad, are delighted to see a fellow countryman. Not I. There are quite enough Englishmen at home without my wanting to run into them abroad.So Edward Enfield sets off on this enjoyable cycling trip, ca...

"Cardiac resuscitation was often applied to a patient who was fast asleep. The hapless victim woke from a peaceful slumber to find somebody, often an infidel, jumping up and down on his chest." Lydia Laube worked as a nurse in Saudi Arabia in a society that does not allow women to drive, vote, or speak to a man alone. Wearing head-to-toe coverings in stifling heat, and battling administrative apathy, Lydia Laube kept her sanity and got her passport back. "Behind the Veil&quo...

Journey through Poland, Ukraine, Slovenia, and other places neglected by tourists, with "an accomplished stylist with an eye for telling detail" (Irvine Welsh).Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. By car, train, bus, and ferry, he goes from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine—to small towns and villages with strangely evocative names. "The heart of my Europe," he tells us, "beats in Sokolów P...

Michael Palin's superb No. 1 bestseller about his incredible voyage across the Sahara.Michael Palin's epic voyages have seen him circumnavigate the globe, travel from the North to the South Pole and circle the countries of the Pacific Ocean, but this was perhaps the greatest challenge yet: to cross the vast and merciless Sahara desert.As the journey unfolds, the Sahara reveals not the emptiness of endless sand dunes, but a huge and diverse range of cultures...

A UNIQUE EXPLORATION OF GERMAN CULTURE, FROM SAUSAGE ADVERTISEMENTS TO WAGNERSitting on a bench at a communal table in a restaurant in Regensburg, his plate loaded with disturbing amounts of bratwurst and sauerkraut made golden by candlelight shining through a massive glass of beer, Simon Winder was happily swinging his legs when a couple from Rottweil politely but awkwardly asked: "So: why are you here?"This book is an attempt to answer that questi...

A charmingly personal history of Hapsburg Europe, as lively as it is informative, by the author of GermaniaFor centuries much of Europe and the Holy Roman Empire was in the royal hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off—through luck, guile and sheer mulishness—any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the D...