‘A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time’ John le Carré
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric...
A young Englishman, Tom Swan, has been ordered by his Cardinal to find a spy-a traitor. At the same time, a rich merchant has offered him a great deal of money to-well, to steal something. Something that belonged to Alexander the...
Paul Theroux, the author of the train travel classics The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, takes to the rails once again in this account of his epic journey through China. He hops aboard as part of a tour group in London and sets...
A young Englishman, Tom Swan, is badly wounded in a desperate sea fight. When he wakes in a hospital, he's in one of the last towns in Greece holding out against the Turks. And there aren't any women to be found. Rich men vie to hire him, and...
Allan Quartermain – our hero – and Ayesha (that is, She Who Must Be Obeyed) share the limelight in this great adventure, but oddly enough considering the stars on stage, it’s Umslopogaas the Zulu who steals the show. A supernatural fantasy...
Shukshin may be an ordinary truck driver, but his delivery route demands all the poise and determination of a ship’s captain in the vice-grip of a storm. He travels a highway buried in the depths of the Siberian taiga to bring vital supplies to...
Although Durrell spent much of his life beside the Mediterranean, he wrote relatively little about Italy; it was always somewhere that he was passing through on the way to somewhere else. Sicilian Carousel is his only piece of extended writing on...
This heartfelt and revealing account of Paul Theroux's thirty-year friendship with the legendary V. S. Naipaul is an intimate record of a literary mentorship that traces the growth of both writers' careers and explores the unique effect each had...
Without aiming to be a survival guide, romance or autobiography, Sunbathing in Siberia manages to be all of them and none. Told completely from the Trans-Siberian and a series of Russian jets, this is the story of a young British poet, who, after...