INTRODUCED BY WILLIAM ATKINS, author of The Immeasurable World'I am merely an eccentric, a dreamer who wishes to live far from the civilized world, as a free nomad.'Isabelle Eberhardt's writing chronicles, in passionate prose, her travels in French colonial North Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Often dressed in male clothing and assuming a man's name, she worked as a war correspondent, married a Muslim non-commissioned officer, conv...

An extraordinary evocation of the desert and its people by a woman who dressed as a man in order to travel alone and unimpeded throughout North Africa In 1897 Isabelle Eberhardt, at the age of 20, left an already unconventional life in Geneva for the Morroccan frontier. Gripped by spiritual restlessness and the desire to break free from the confinements of her society she traveled into the desert, and into the heart of Islam. Her experiences inspired a profound self-examination, anda book ...

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India. A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alar...

Volume I of the masterful Cairo Trilogy. A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.

In 1933 Robert Byron began a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Teheran to Oxiana--the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya which forms part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. The Road to Oxiana offers not only a wonderful record of his adventures, but also a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now inaccessible to most Western travelers.

From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a young man sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner by pirates and delivered to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople. There he is forced into slavery and left in the custody of a brilliant Turkish invent...

The Way of the World, a cult classic, is the beguiling tale of an impecunious and life-enhancing journey from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in the '50s. When Nicolas Bouvier and the artist Thierry Vernet set out, they had money for four months and a sturdy Fiat Topolino. They broke their journey when money ran low, to teach and sell paintings and articles in Istanbul, Tabriz and eventually in Quetta. Gravitating towards the poorer neighbourhoods, they spent intoxicating nights listening to gyp...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Meet the people of Cairo's Gamaliya quarter. There is Nabqa, son of Adam the waterseller who can only speak truths; the beautiful and talented Tawhida who does not age with time; Ali Zaidan, the gambler, late to love; and Boss Saqr who stashes his money above the bath. A neighbourhood of demons, dancing and sweet halva, the quarter keeps quiet vigil over the secrets of all who live there. This collection by pre-eminent Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz was recently discovered among his old pa...

The Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz refashions the classic tales of Scheherazade into a novel written in his own imaginative, spellbinding style. Here are genies and flying carpets, Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other familiar stories from the tradition of The One Thousand and One Nights, made new by the magical pen of the acknowledged dean of Arabic letters, who plumbs their depths for timeless truths.

"And the desert has you - you and your splendid courage my queen of the desert - and my heart with you" Major Charles Doughty-Wylie Gertrude Bell CBE is rightly known as 'The Queen of the Desert' and a new Hollywood film based on her life, featuring Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis and Robert Pattinson is due for release in 2015. A woman far ahead of her time, Gertrude gained a first from Oxford at a time when very few subjects were even open to women. She went on to take an activ...

Naguib Mahfouz's haunting novella of post-revolutionary Egypt combines a vivid pychological portrait of an anguished man with the suspense and rapid pace of a detective story.After four years in prison, the skilled young thief Said Mahran emerges bent on revenge. He finds a world that has changed in more ways than one. Egypt has undergone a revolution and, on a more personal level, his beloved wife and his trusted henchman, who conspired to betray him to the police, are now married...