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In twelfth century Cambodia, a young woman called Jorani earns her living guiding pilgrims up a two thousand-step stairway to the magnificent cliff-top temple, Preah Vihear. One day, she accidentally witnesses the furtive burning of sacred palm-leaf documents, and is drawn into a succession struggle at the temple. She is forced to choose between loyalty to family and to the son of the abbot, with whom she forms an unlikely bond. Set in the golden age of Cambodia's Angkor civilization, The Stairw...

Europe has been widely acclaimed as among the finest achievements of 'one of our greatest living writers' (The Times). A personal appreciation, fuelled by five decades of journeying, this is Jan Morris at her best - at once magisterial and particular, whimsical and profound. It is a matchless portrait of a continent.

Fresh from her successful scoop reporting the first ascent of Everest in 1953, Jan Morris spent a year journeying across the United States, by car, train, ship and aeroplane. In herwords a "period piece", Coast to Coast describes an American identity markedly different from today. In her brilliant prose, Morris records with exuberence and curiosity a time of innocence in the US - when television was in its infancy, the Big Mac had not been invented and the popular song of the day was "Chattanoog...

The poems in William Virgil Davis's Landscape and Journey constitute forays onto actual terrain—either close to home in Texas or farther off in Wales—as well as exploring what the poet Guy Davenport once called the geography of the imagination. A number of the poems here recount the closely observed details of journeys the poet has made, travels he has literally taken. At other times they tell of imaginary journeys—travels the poet would like to take or "travels" to places only "visible" in the...

'The pace of this kind of travel has not much changed since Fogg set out in 1872. Trains may be a little faster, but there are certainly no high-speed rail links yet across India, China or the USA. Passenger services have practically disappeared from the world's shipping lanes ... Recourse to air travel, even as a convenient means of escape, was not allowed.'Following the route taken by Phileas Fogg 115 years earlier, Michael Palin set out from the Reform Club to circumnavigate the world. The r...

The author of Video Night in Kathmandu ups the ante on himself in this sublimely evocative and acerbically funny tour through the world's loneliest and most eccentric places. From Iceland to Bhutan to Argentina, Iyer remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.

On ten strolls through some of the most interesting areas of London, Rudiger Gorner explores the literary landscape of the capital. He meets Shakespeare, Heine and Hogarth south of the river, finds Virginia Woolf and Lady Ottoline Morell in Bloomsbury, discovers Blake and Trollope in Westminster, happens on the Carlyles in Chelsea, comes across John Keats in beautiful Hampstead and searches for Bacon and Hanif Kureishi in the London suburbs. Following this literary rambler means discovering fami...

With a polished walking stick and neatly pressed trousers, Richard Halliburton served as an intrepid globetrotting guide for millions of Americans in the 1920s and '30s. Readers waited with bated breath for each new article and book he wrote. During his career, Halliburton climbed the Matterhorn, nearly fell out of his plane while shooting the first aerial photographs of Mount Everest, and became the first person to swim the full length of the Panama Canal. With his matinee idol looks, the Tenne...

An ethereal meditation on longing, loss, and time, sweeping from the highways of Texas to the canals of Mars—by the acclaimed essayist and author of Shame and Wonder  David Searcy’s writing is enchanting and peculiar, obsessed with plumbing the mysteries and wonders of our everyday world, the beauty and cruelty of time, and nothing less than what he calls “the whole idea of meaning.” In The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World, he leads the reader across the landscapes of his extraor...

An original and magical map of our world and its riches, formed of the stories of the small-scale harvests of seven natural objects In this beguiling book, Edward Posnett journeys to some of the most far-flung locales on the planet to bring us seven wonders of the natural world--eiderdown, edible birds' nests, civet coffee, sea silk, vicuna fiber, vegetable ivory, and guano--that promise ways of using nature without damaging it. To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities, but...

2020 Montana Book Award Honor Book "(These) stories should be required reading." -Montana Book Award Committee Tom "Harp" Harpole was a horse logger working from remote mountain camps and living in wall tents until an accident suggested a change of lifestyle. He took to his other avocation - writing, and studied abroad in Ireland. He began publishing stories in periodicals such as Smithsonian Air & Space, Sports Illustrated, Crocodil, Montana Quarterly, Whitefish Review, and more. In 198...

Caught between travel guides and artists' books, the travel diary has swung between a journalistic documentary style and visual expression. It is a literary and artistic genre that is composite and plural, heterogeneous and subjective. This book illustrates the great scientific and journalistic adventures in history, from the Egyptian campaign to the war in Iraq, while describing the artistic techniques and contemporary trends in travel sketchbooks. It also explores more intimate territories, ca...

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ACCLAIMED THE GRAN TOUR AND THE MARMALADE DIARIESAn irreverent homage to the '95 travel classic.'It would be wrong to view this book as just a highly accomplished homage to a personal hero. Aitken's politics, as much as his humour, are firmly in the spotlight, and Dear Bill Bryson achieves more than its title (possibly even its author) intended.' Manchester ReviewIn 2013, travel writer Ben Aitken decided to follow in the footsteps of his hero - literally - and started a jo...