Books for The Armchair Traveller

Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe
Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe

Duncan Minshull

Sauntering features sixty writers – classic and contemporary – who travel Europe by foot. We join Henriette D’Angeville climbing Mont Blanc; Nellie Bly roaming the trenches of war-torn Poland; Werner Herzog on a personal pilgrimage across Germany; Hans Christian Andersen in quarantine; Joseph Conrad in Cracow; and Robert Macfarlane dropping deep into underground Paris.

Brazil That Never Was
Brazil That Never Was

A. J. Lees

This unique travel book on Brazil by A. J. Lees tells the true Colonel Fawcett story. Colonel Percy Fawcett was a British explorer, who in 1925 had gone in search of the lost city of Z in the Amazon, but never returned. Part Amazon travelogue, part memoir, Lees paints a portrait of an elusive Brazil and a flawed explorer whose doomed mission ruined lives.

Brazil That Never Was – Signed Copy
Brazil That Never Was – Signed Copy

A. J. Lees

This unique travel book on Brazil by A. J. Lees tells the true Colonel Fawcett story. Colonel Percy Fawcett was a British explorer, who in 1925 had gone in search of the lost city of Z in the Amazon, but never returned. Part Amazon travelogue, part memoir, Lees paints a portrait of an elusive Brazil and a flawed explorer whose doomed mission ruined lives.

Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking
Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking

Duncan Minshull

Walking and writing have always gone together. Think of the poets who walk out a rhythm for their lines and the novelists who put their characters on a path. But the best insights, the deepest and most joyous examinations of this simple activity are to be found in non-fiction – in essays, travelogues and memoir.

Notting Hill: A Walking  Guide
Notting Hill: A Walking Guide

Julian Mash

A delightful English/Japanese pocket-size guide to London’s most popular district. Through four walks London writer Julian Mash uncovers the history, culture and fascinating characters that have made Notting Hill so iconic. Beautifully laid out including several photographic images and four hand-drawn maps, the guide will appeal to both tourists and residents alike.

Exile
Exile

Three extraordinary writers – Oscar Wilde, Richard Sennett, and Kirsty Gunn – reflect on the condition of exile.

Voyage
Voyage

For the armchair traveller, three poetic journeys that fundamentally changed those who took them.

 

The Paradoxal Compass: Drake’s Dilemma
The Paradoxal Compass: Drake’s Dilemma

Horatio Morpurgo

The Paradoxal Compass is both historical narrative and environmental manifesto. Morpurgo compares our own tipping point with the ‘great unsettling’ faced by the Elizabethans more than four centuries ago. As the modern world continues to plunder the ‘infinite store’ of the earth’s riches, Morpurgo explores how our abusive relationship with the natural world began. He asks what the Age of Discovery might have to teach us in the current environmental crisis, as we too reappraise our place in the world.

Nairn’s Paris
Nairn’s Paris

Ian Nairn Andrew Hussey

Out of print since 1968, this is a unique guidebook from the late, great architectural writer, Ian Nairn. Illustrated with the author’s black and white snaps of the city, Nairn gives his readers an idiosyncratic and unpretentious portrait of the ‘collective masterpiece’ that is Paris.

My Katherine Mansfield Project
My Katherine Mansfield Project

Kirsty Gunn

In this lyrical essay, Gunn explores the ideas of home and belonging – and of her own deep connection to a place where every flower and gatepost seems embroidered with the memory of some story or another.

Pilgrims of the Air: The Passing of the Passenger Pigeons
Pilgrims of the Air: The Passing of the Passenger Pigeons

John Wilson Foster

This is a story of the rapid and brutal extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, once so abundant that they ‘blotted out the sky’, until the last bird died on 1st September 1914. It is also an evocative story of wild America.

Nairn’s Towns
Nairn’s Towns

Ian Nairn Owen Hatherley

These essays show the late, great architectural critic Ian Nairn, writing about cities and towns as a whole rather than as collections of individual buildings.

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