Showing titles in Travel Writing & Commentary

A Waterstones Travel Book of the Year 2023 A funny, warm and timely meditation on identity and belonging, following the scenic route along the England–Wales border: Britain’s deepest faultline. There is a line on the map: to one side Wales, small, rugged and stubborn; on the other England...

The Portuguese Lab is your one-stop podcast to learn European Portuguese (from Portugal). Improve the different skills of the language and learn how to be an independent and successful learner.

Michael Palin is off again, this time to the seemingly desolate Sahara Desert. There's no easy way across, as he and his team discover on their most challenging expedition yet.

Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see...

Presenter Brett Westwood joins forces with BAFTA award-winning producer and naturalist Stephen Moss for six delightful and informative series, introducing us to some of Britain's most popular and best-loved birds. Together with wildlife sound recordist Chris Moss, they tour the UK, tracking down the rich variety of species that make their home there - from garden and woodland birds to ones that live on water, by the coast, on farms and in the mountains and moors. 

In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256 mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born.

The Sunday Times bestseller, read by the author. In his darkest depression, one idea brought Christian Lewis out of the depths – and into a new life. Finding Hildasay is a brutal and beautiful true story of mental health, survival, walking, and the meaning of home. ‘Now I was finally out of...

From the moment Peter Mayle and his wife, Jennie, uprooted their lives in England and crossed the Channel permanently, they never looked back. Here the beloved author of A Year in Provence pays tribute to the most endearing and enduring aspects of his life in France—the charming and indelible...

A Sunday Times Book of the Week and Top 10 Bestseller A Times bestseller A Waterstones Paperback of the Year 2024 A Spectator Book of the Year What kind of country is England today? What does it mean to be English? Are we hungry for change or seeking old certainties? Join Stuart Maconie on an...

What happens when you take a battered Dacia Duster, one determined couple, and point them toward the edge of the world? A Dirty Duster to Iceland: Circumnavigating Fire and Ice is not your typical guidebook—and not quite a travel diary either. It sits somewhere in between. Part road trip, part reflection, and part survival-by-sandwiches, this is a fourteen-day, 2,300-kilometre journey around Iceland’s Ring Road—across volcanic plains, glacial lagoons, windswept fjords, and vast stretches of beautiful, bewildering nothingness.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The beloved memoir of self-discovery set against the spectacular Tuscan countryside that inspired the major motion picture starring Diane Lane—now in a twentieth-anniversary edition featuring a new afterword “This beautifully written memoir about taking...

Brought to you by Penguin. Join Douglas Adams, bestselling and beloved author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and zoologist Mark Carwardine on an adventure in search of the world’s most endangered and exotic creatures. In this book, Adams’ self-proclaimed favourite of his own...

Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? Or have we tarmacked, farmed and built ourselves out of wildness? In his vital, bewitching, inspiring classic, Robert Macfarlane sets out in search of the wildness that remains.

Driven by a desire to break free from his mediocre, middle-class existence and escape the Belfast (IRA) “Troubles” of the 70’s, Chris Donaldson strikes out on his café racing Moto Guzzi on a cross-country roadtrip of self-discovery. But when the Iranian revolution stops the planned motorcycle trip to Australia, he switches gears and begins a 33-country, 50,000-mile odyssey across Europe, Asia, and the Americas including 10,000 miles on an ocean-going racing yacht.

What would you do if you're given a €20 note in Greece with an email address scribbled on it: Spend it, slip the suspect counterfeit bill into an enemy’s birthday card, or send an email, hoping it will lead to you finding everlasting love? Brad, a hopeless romantic, chose the latter. Two years later, his love life remains a disaster and his career is misfiring. As he’s about to walk Spain’s fabled Camino de Santiago to ponder some profound life changes, Brad receives a reply.

Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than 50 years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces.

‘The finest book ever written about England and the English’ Stuart Maconie ‘J. B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century and it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius.’ Dame Judi Dench Three years before George Orwell made his expedition to the far...

Keith Foskett’s dream of escape started with a single step. When the long-distance hiker chose to backpack all 2,180 miles of the Appalachian Trail, he left ordinary life behind for five months. Enduring an incredible test of physical and psychological strength, Foskett was pushed to his limits....

In Hope and Glory, Stuart goes in search of the places, people and events of the century we have just left behind that have shaped the look and character of modern Britain. From the death of Victoria to the demise of New Labour, he takes a single event from each decade of the 20th century that offers up a defining moment in our history and then goes in search of its legacy today.

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD is a journey as satisfying for the armchair traveller as the long-distance cyclist. Enriched with history, humour and insight, it’s a tribute to Britain and the endless appeal of the open road.