The Travel Survival Guide - Get Smart, Stay Safe by Lloyd Figgins

$14.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

The rewards you can reap from exploring this amazing planet are incalculable. Every year, more and more of us are discovering the joy, the excitement, the sheer sense of adventure in roaming the world. But travelling, particularly to the more remote and volatile corners of the globe, can be a dangerous business. If you don't prepare properly--by looking for potential hazards and learning how best to deal with them--you may wish you'd never started out. Written by international security expert Lloyd Figgins, using his experience of over 80 countries, this unique new travel guide is essential reading for anyone planning an overseas trip, whether on business, as a tourist or gap-year traveler. If you want no-nonsense, easy-to-follow, practical advice on how to recognize the warning signs, how to prevent problems and cope with emergencies (should they occur), this is the book for you. ...Show more

Footnotes - A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers by Peter Fiennes

$22.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

'The premise of this book is simple, or that is what it seemed when I started.' Peter Fiennes follows in the footsteps of twelve inspirational writers, bringing modern Britain into focus by peering through the lens of the past. The journey starts in Dorset, shaped by the childhood visions of Enid Blyton , and ends with Charles Dickens on the train that took him to his final resting place in Westminster Abbey. From the wilds of Skye and Snowdon, to a big night out in Birmingham with J. B. Priestley and Beryl Bainbridge, Footnotes is a series of evocative biographies, a lyrical foray into the past, and a quest to understand Britain through the books, journals and diaries of some of our greatest writers. And as Fiennes travels the country, and roams across the centuries, he wonders- 'Who are we? What do we want? They seemed like good questions to ask, in the company of some of our greatest writers, given these restless times.' ...Show more

Atlantis: A Journey in Search of Beauty by Carlo Piano; Renzo Piano; Will Schutt (Translator)

$29.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

Renowned architect Renzo Piano (the New Whitney Museum, the Pompidou Center, Potsdamer Platz, Cite Internationale, New York Times Building, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, etc.) and his son Carlo, a well-regarded journalist, set sail from Genoa one late Summer day to search for Atlantis, the perf ect city, built to harbor a perfect society. Embarking not only on a life-changing journey but also on series of conversations that are humorous, irreverent, erudite, and always entertaining, Renzo and Carlo travel from Genoa in search of the perfect city, along the way reflecting on their own relationship, on fathers and sons, on the idea of travel itself, and perhaps most notably on architecture, space, and the secret life of forms. Piano, subject of The Art of Making Buildings and a man who can not only measure land at a glance but also the sea's infinite geometry, returns to the places where he has created his iconic works, mosaic pieces in the infinite, necessary quest for perfection. With his son he sails across the Pacific, along the banks of the Thames and the Seine, reaching as far as Athens, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and Osaka Bay. In search of beauty, Piano finds only imperfection. And so, all that remains is to sail on, in the company of his son. ...Show more

Womadic Wanders - Stories of a Compulsive Wanderer by Gerdette Rooney

$29.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

This book contains the stories of a self-coined 'woman nomad' who has always felt an affinity with the nomadic and the unsettled. Irishwoman Gerdette Rooney has travelled the world solo with her rucksack, camera and hiking boots. With a natural curiosity for other cultures, peoples and ancient rock art, she likes nothing better than to mingle with the locals. She has had many adventures - and mishaps - over the years, normally trying to avoid the more commonplace destinations in search of the ever-elusive tranquillity of mountains and Nature's pristine regions. However, she has sometimes stumbled on troubled places that proved challenging but interesting. Her profession as a radiographer took her to Soweto in South Africa, where she witnessed the injustices of apartheid and she also worked in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. The collection stems from fifty years of diary-keeping penned in many hostels, doss houses and hammocks. These stories will transplant you to the far corners of our amazing planet: the lush rainforest of Rwanda, the undulating dunes of the Sahara desert and the arid wastes of the Silk Road. Many are set in her favourite continent Africa.   ...Show more

Sydney by Delia Falconer

$29.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative | Series: City Ser.

Part memoir, part guide to Sydney, Australia, this melancholic, moving, and funny exploration intertwines novelist Delia Falconer's own stories with the city's historical and literary past, showing how the city has evolved from the 1970s through today. From mad clergymen and amateur astronomers to Indig enous weather experts and local artists, this personal and unique record depicts the inhabitants of a beautiful, violent, and deeply spiritual city. ...Show more

Mud and Stars - Travels in Russia with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of TheGolden Age by Sara Wheeler

$35.00 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

To write this book award-winning writer Sara Wheeler travelled across eight time zones in Russia, from rinsed north-western beetroot fields and far-eastern Arctic tundra where Chukchi still hunt walrus to the cauldron of ethnic soup that is the Caucasus. Her guides were the writers of the Golden Age, Pu shkin to Tolstoy via Gogol and Turgenev (broadly, the period between 1800 and 1910). Mostly, on her travels, she used homestays, spending many months in fourth-floor 1950s apartments with windowless bathrooms, sprawled on sofas with her hosts, watching television, her new friends bent over devices and moaning about Ukraine. She wrote Mud and Stars at a time of deteriorating relations between the West and Russia. Nationalism has besieged the country. People she stayed with or met on trains had no illusions about the kleptocracy under which they lived, but as they watched flickering images of Putin bending a piece of metal with his bare hands, the reprise was always, 'Yes, he's a monster. But he's our monster.' In these pages Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news - a Russia of common humanity and daily struggles. Her aim is to show how the writers of the Golden Age represent their country, then and now. In doing so she resolved to give the 'ordinary' people of Russia - a country that occupies one sixth of the earth's land surface - a voice. Wheeler followed nineteenth-century footsteps in order to make connections between then and now, between the places where flashing-epauletted Lermontov died in the aromatic air of Pyatigorsk and sheaves of corn still stand like soldiers on a blazing afternoon, just like they do in Gogol's stories. On the Trans-Siberian in winter she crunched across snowy platforms to buy dried fish from babushki, and in summer sailed the Black Sea where dolphins leapt in front of violet Abkhazian peaks. There is a Russian literal landscape, and its emotional counterpart. Mud and Stars explores both. ...Show more

Traveling Literary America - A Complete Guide to Literary Landmarks by B. J. Welborn

$7.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

Readers and travelers are guided to more than 200 homes and historic sites of America’s greatest writers—from the Jack London Ranch in northern California to William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. Clear driving directions and visitor instructions are combined with unique tidbits about each site and author, such as the story of Jack London’s custom-made furniture and the roll top desk and Dictaphone on display in his study. Literary enthusiasts are guided to the site of Thoreau’s bean field, where they can poke around an exact replica of his cabin. They can drop in on Margaret Mitchell’s recently restored Atlanta apartment or visit John Steinbeck’s haunts in the cozy California seaside town of Pacific Grove. This family-oriented, user-friendly guide teaches literary folk about writers' work, their philosophies, and the forces that compelled them to write. All 50 states are represented, and the literary sites are divided by geographic regions. ...Show more

The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest by Mark Synnott

$32.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

Veteran climber Mark Synnott never planned on climbing Mount Everest, but a hundred-year mystery lured him into an expedition--and an awesome history of passionate adventure, chilling tragedy, and human aspiration unfolded. On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and "Sandy" Irvine set out to stand on the roof of the world, where no one had stood before. They were last seen eight hundred feet shy of Everest's summit. A century later, we still don't know whether they achieved their goal, decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay did, in 1953. Irvine carried a Kodak camera with him to record their attempt, but it, along with his body, had never been found. Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit and take a photograph before they fell to their deaths? Mark Synnott made his own ascent up the infamous North Face along with a filmmaker using drone technology higher than any had previously flown. His goal: to find Irvine's body and the camera he carried that might have held a summit photo on its still-viable film. Synnott's quest led him from oxygen-deprivation training to archives and museums in England, to Kathmandu, the Tibetan High Plateau, and up the North Face into a storm during a season described as the one that broke Everest. An awful traffic jam of climbers at the very summit resulted in tragic deaths. Sherpas revolted. Chinese government agents turned adversarial. An Indian woman crawled her way to safety and survival. Synnott himself went off the safety rope--if he had slipped, no one would have been able to save him--desperate to solve the mystery. A magnificent story a la The Lost City of Z, The Third Pole conveys the miracle of a mountain the world wants to own, and the first explorers who may have done so. ...Show more

Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght

$39.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

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

Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other by Sam Heughan; Graham McTavish

$32.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

From their faithful camper van to boats, kayaks, bicycles, and motorbikes, join stars of Outlander, Sam and Graham on a road trip with a difference, as two Scotsmen explore a land of raw beauty, poetry, feuding, music, history, and warfare. Unlikely friends Sam and Graham begin their journey in the hea rt of Scotland at Glencoe and travel from there all the way to Inverness and Culloden battlefield, where along the way they experience adventure and a cast of highland characters. In this story of friendship, finding themselves, and whisky, they discover the complexity, rich history and culture of their native country. ...Show more

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

$35.00 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative

Raynor Winn's magical and life-affirming new book, The Wild Silence - the follow-up to the uplifting, Sunday Times, internationally bestselling, Wainwright prize shortlisted, and Costa shortlisted, The Salt Path. In The Salt Path, Raynor and Moth go out to find the sea, the windswept and wild coastline, to find a way through homelessness, to find themselves again. Now, in The Wild Silence, they come back to what should be home, but four walls no longer feel that way. For Raynor, recovering self-esteem and trust in herself, and in others, is harder than she expected. She continues to face Moth's debilitating illness and struggles to find a way to adjust to a life in one place, unmoving. Until an incredible gesture by someone who read their story changes everything . . . Praise for The Salt Path: 'A beautiful book, it really lives up to the hype . . . an enjoyable, gentle yet moving read' Pandora Sykes on The High Low 'A beautiful, thoughtful, lyrical story of homelessness, human strength and endurance' Guardian 'Mesmerising. It is one of the most uplifting, inspiring books that I've ever read' i ...Show more

Only Way Home: One Woman, Two Donkeys and an Extraordinary Outback Journey of Healing and Renewal by Liz Byron

$24.99 AUD

Category: Travel Narrative