Showing titles in Europe

Whether in lake, lido, river or sea, we know the benefits of swimming outdoors and in nature—environmentally friendly and accessible, it can influence our happiness, our energy and our inner tranquillity. Winter Swimming takes this one step further, as contact with cold water all year round can also have a significant positive impact on our physical health, confidence and well-being. Danish scientist Susanna Søberg leads us step by step into the icy water and explains the 'cold-shock response', the massive endorphin rush as our body reacts and adapts.

Visiting Iceland as an anthropologist and film-maker in 2008, Sarah Thomas is spellbound by its otherworldly landscape. An immediate love for this country and for Bjarni, a man she meets there, turns a week-long stay into a transformative half-decade, one which radically alters Sarah's understanding of herself and of the living world. She embarks on a relationship not only with Bjarni, but with the light, the language and the old wooden house they make their home.

Scandinavian history has been one of dramatic discontinuities of collapse and restarts, from the Viking Age to the Age of Perpetual War to the modern age today. For a thousand years, the Scandinavian countries were kingdoms of repression where monarchs played at the game of being European powers, at the expense of their own populations. The brand we now know as "Scandinavia" is a recent invention. During most of its history, Denmark and Sweden, and to some degree Norway, were bloody enemies. These sentiments of enmity have not been fully settled.

No grammar tests. No memory drills. No chance of failure. Welcome to Learn with Paul Noble – a unique, tried and tested language learning method that has been used by almost a million people to speak fluently and confidently in no time at all. Take a simple, relaxed approach to learning a...

'Top-notch’ Good Housekeeping – BEST PARENTING BOOKS 'Helen has a way to take big ideas and convey them with warmth and wisdom' Dr Rangan Chatterjee 'A well researched study injected with humour and humanity' Mail on Sunday *Featured on The Happiness Lab with Dr Laurie Santos* After a decade...

I Know This Much – written and read by Gary Kemp – Spandau Ballet's prime mover – is simply the freshest, most exciting and best read memoir to arrive for years Gary's story begins in North London, where the Kemp family rented a home with no bathrooms and chickens in the yard. After a...

A little over 10 years ago, Janine Marsh and her husband gave up their careers in London to chase the good life in the countryside of northern France. Having overcome the obstacles of starting to renovate her dream home - an ancient, dilapidated barn - and fitting in with the peculiarities of the locals, Janine is now the go-to expat in the area for those seeking to get to grips with a very different way of life. In this book, Janine regales us with the delights and dramas of a year attempting to live the rural idyll.

Excite your little language leaner with this easy and engaging audio course for kids. This step-by-step French course follows the relaxed approach of bestselling language coach, Paul Noble, who guides children gently through the basics, with no mention of grammar or text books. Simply listen...

The perfect Portuguese course for travel in Portugal. It is designed to help you ask for the things you’re most likely to need when visiting Portugal and to give you the skills to cope with situations you might find yourself in. The accompanying free booklet is also available to download at...

Committed Belgophile and road cycling obsessive Harry Pearson takes you on a journey across Flanders - through the lumpy horizontal rain, up the elbow-juddering cobbled inclines, past the fans dressed as chickens and the shop window displays of constipation medicines as he follows races big, small and even smaller, through one glorious, muddy spring. Ranging over 500 years of Flemish and European history, Pearson examines the characters, the myths and the rivalries that make Flanders a place where cycling is a religion and the riders its Lycra-clad priests.

American-born Paul Theroux had lived in England for 11 years when he realized he'd explored dozens of exotic locations without discovering anything about his adopted home. So, with a knapsack on his back, he set out to explore by walking and by short train trips. The result is a witty, observant and often acerbic look at an ever eccentric assortments of Brits in all shapes and sizes.

A Waterstones Best History Book of the Year The bestselling history of the North of England as told through the lives of its inhabitants. ‘Entertaining’ The Times ‘Definitive’ The Mirror ‘Highly readable’ Financial Times A work of unrivalled scale and ambition, Northerners is the...

Winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, Silver PEN Award, 1987.The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary. Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania.

Every year upon arriving in Plobien, the small Breton town where he spends his summers, American writer Mark Greenside picks back up where he left off with his faux-pas-filled Francophile life. Mellowed and humbled, but not daunted (OK, slightly daunted), he faces imminent concerns: What does he cook for a French person? Who has the right-of-way when entering or exiting a roundabout? Where does he pay for a parking ticket? And most dauntingly of all, when can he touch the tomatoes?

'Heartfelt and beautifully written, this is the author's best book to date' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Caroline James, bestselling author of The Cruise Where books are borrowed, friendships are forged and secrets uncovered… As a beautiful summer unfolds in the Croatian islands, Ana Meštrović embarks on...

No grammar tests. No memory drills. No chance of failure. Welcome to Learn with Paul Noble – a unique, tried and tested language learning method that has been used by almost a million people to speak fluently and confidently in no time at all. Take a simple, relaxed approach to learning a...

No grammar tests. No memory drills. No chance of failure. Welcome to Learn with Paul Noble – a unique, tried and tested language learning method that has been used by almost a million people to speak fluently and confidently in no time at all. Take a simple, relaxed approach to learning a...

When Rosie Harper leaves behind her ordinary life in England to open a flower shop on Amsterdam’s water, she expects nothing less than a fairytale. But the city’s canals have their own currents, bringing far more than she bargained for. Max, her handsome but brooding artist neighbour, prefers to keep the world at arm’s length – and living on a nearby houseboat, he’s not too thrilled about the new company. As Rosie’s business blossoms, so do her feelings for Max, who’s stuck in his past.

Ingrid Barrøy is born on an island that bears her name - a holdfast for a single family, their livestock, their crops, their hopes and dreams. Her father dreams of building a quay that will connect them to the mainland, but closer ties to the wider world come at a price. Her mother has her own dreams - more children, a smaller island, a different life - and there is one question Ingrid must never ask her. Island life is hard, a living scratched from the dirt or trawled from the sea, so when Ingrid comes of age, she is sent to the mainland to work for one of the wealthy families on the coast.

Put Jonathan Raban on a boat and the results will be fascinating, and never more so than when he’s sailing around the serpentine, two-thousand-mile coast of his native England. In this acutely perceived and beautifully written book, the bestselling author of Bad Land turns that voyage—which coincided with the Falklands war of 1982—into an occasion for meditations on his country, his childhood, and the elusive notion of home.