Travel guides and adventures.
Laurence Blair (b 09) is pleased to report that his first book, PATRIA, was published by Vintage Books on 7 November 2024. PATRIA is an alternative history of South America, combining archival research, travel writing, and a decade’s worth of present-day reporting for the BBC, the Guardian, and the New York Times from across the … Read more
Running on Empty: 18,000 miles down Africa with Parkinson’s by Guy Deacon. ‘An immense feat of endurance, a remarkable achievement, and a truly inspirational adventure filled with courage and hope’ – Sir Ranulph Fiennes. At the age of sixty, and having lived with Parkinson’s disease for over ten years, Guy Deacon CBE set out on … Read more
Imagine it’s 1965, and you’ve just fulfilled a boyhood ambition and graduated from the vet college in Glasgow, Scotland. The very next week you find yourself in Kenya, treating wild animals. This is what happened to Dr. Jerry Haigh, who in Wrestling with Rhinos takes us deep into the post-independence Kenya of 1965, and shows … Read more
It is 1970 and in London a group of people gather around a Land Rover covered in jerry cans and rigged up to a trailer. Ahead lies a journey of many thousands of miles on ‘The Hippie Trail’, the well-trodden route from London to Nepal. They will encounter every imaginable hazard along increasingly dangerous roads … Read more
Confessions of an English Alcalde: a Cautionary Tale is a compelling and richly entertaining account of life, with both its joys and complications, in a small village set deep among the olive groves of Andalusia. It sets the dream of rural bliss against the demanding and sometimes harsh reality of adjusting to values and a … Read more
In Dining with al-Qaeda, Hugh Pope guides the reader on an enlightening, unexpected and sometimes tragi-comic journey through more than a dozen countries, from Afghanistan to Turkey and from Sudan to Iraq. Speaking Arabic, Persian and Turkish, Pope’s experiences give a first-hand feel for warfronts and sieges, Persian poetry and Islamic revolution, and, not least, … Read more
In Letters from The Barren Lands: An Epic Journey of Hardship and Privation, modern day adventurer Carsten Iwers has made available for the first-time Captain J.C. Critchell Bullock’s (Lyon 1913-16) own account of the near-fatal winter of 1924-25 he spent with John Hornby (‘The Hermit of the Arctic’) in the Canadian Barren Lands. Using previously … Read more
Storyteller Jerry Haigh shares his adventures as a wildlife veterinarian with the University of Saskatchewan and coming from a clinic at the base of spectacular Mount Kenya in Africa to the flat lands of the Canadian prairies in Saskatchewan. He worked with wild animals such as moose, polar bears and even a toothless old lion: … Read more
After almost a decade of reporting on the exploits of the pro peloton, raconteur Felix Lowe takes to the saddle and sets out to conquer the road from Barcelona to Rome. Powered by local delicacies, painkillers and imaginary fans, Lowe pedals his way through three countries and over three mountain ranges, taking in some of … Read more
Jason Lewis, To the Brink (The Expedition Trilogy, Book 3): True Story of the First Human-Powered Circumnavigation of the Earth. We rejoin The Expedition for its third and final instalment with Jason, now seasoned adventurer, and April, American schoolteacher at sea for the first time, battling to keep their pedal-powered boat Moksha from being dashed against Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. … Read more