Every month we pick a new title that has particularly excited us.
Our book of the month for November is the wonderful An Atlas of Remote Islands.
Please email or phone the shop if you’d like to reserve a copy.
An Atlas of Remote Islands
Judith Schlalansky
Judith Schalansky was born in 1980 on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. The Soviets wouldn’t let anyone travel so everything she learnt about the world came from her parents’ battered old atlas. An acclaimed novelist and award-winning graphic designer, she has spent years creating this, her own imaginative atlas of the world’s loneliest places. These islands are so difficult to reach that until the late 1990s more people had set foot on the moon than on Peter I Island in the Antarctic. On one page are perfect maps, on the other unfold bizarre stories from the history of the islands themselves. Rare animals and strange people abound: from marooned slaves to lonely scientists, lost explorers to confused lighthouse keepers, mutinous sailors to forgotten castaways; a collection of Robinson Crusoes of all kinds. Recently awarded the prize of Germany’s most beautiful book, the “Atlas of Remote Islands” is a intricately designed masterpiece that will delight maplovers everywhere. Judith Schalansky lures us across all the oceans of the world to fifty remote islands – from St Kilda to Easter Island and from Tristan da Cunha to Disappointment Island – and proves that some of the most memorable journeys can be taken by armchair travellers.
Penguin 2010
ISBN 9781846143489
Pbk £25.00
Chasing the Devil:The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit
Tim Butcher
For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been too dangerous to travel through, bedevilled by a uniquely brutal form of violence from which sprang many of Africa’s cruellest contemporary icons – child soldiers, prisoner mutilation, blood diamonds. With their wars officially over, Tim Butcher sets out on a journey across both countries, trekking for 350 miles through remote rainforest and malarial swamps. Just as he followed H M Stanley through the Congo – a journey described in his bestseller “Blood River” – this time he pursues a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935 and immortalised in the travel classic “Journey Without Maps”. Greene took 26 bearers, a case of scotch, and hammocks in which he and his cousin Barbara were carried. Tim walks every blistering inch to gain an extraordinary ground-level view of a troubled and overlooked region. As a journalist in Africa, Tim came to know both countries well although the wars made trips to the jungle hinterland far too risky. This is where he now heads, exploring how rebel groups thrived in the bush for so long and whether the devil of war has truly been chased away. He encounters other ‘devils’, masked figures guarding the spiritual secrets of jungle communities. Some are no more threatening than schoolmasters but others are much more sinister, relying on ritual cannibalism as a source of their magical power. Tim encounters these devils on an epic journey that demands courage, doggedness and good fortune. “Chasing the Devil” is a dramatic travel book touching on one of the most fraught parts of the globe at a unique moment in its history. Weaving history and anthropology with personal narrative – as well as new discoveries about Greene – it is as exciting as it is enlightening.
Chatto & Windus 2010
(2010)
(signed copies available)
ISBN 9780701183608
Hbk £18.99
The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief
V.S. Naipaul
From V. S. Naipaul: For my travel books I travel on a theme. And the theme of “The Masque of Africa” is African belief. I begin in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, do Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and end at the bottom of the continent, in South Africa. My theme is belief, not political or economical life; and yet at the bottom of the continent the political realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account. Perhaps an unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of the subversion of old Africa by the ways of the outside world. The theme held until I got to the South, when the clash of the two ways of thinking and believing became far too one-sided. The skyscrapers of Johannesburg didn’t rest on sand. The older world of magic felt fragile, but at the same time had an enduring quality. You felt that it would survive any calamity. I had expected that over the great size of Africa the practices of magic would significantly vary. But they didn’t. The diviners everywhere wanted to ‘throw the bones’ to read the future and the idea of ‘energy’ remained a constant, to be tapped into by the ritual sacrifice of body parts. In South Africa body parts, mainly of animals, but also of men and women, made a mixture of ‘battle medicine’. To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book.
Picador 2010
ISBN 9780330472050
Hbk £20.00
No Way Down
Graham Bowley
It’s the summit of K2, 1 August 2008. An exhausted band of climbers pump their fists into the clear blue sky – joining the elite who have conquered the world’s most lethal mountain. But as they celebrate, far below them an ice shelf collapses and sweeps away their ropes. They don’t know it yet, but they will be forced to descend into the blackness with no lines. Of the thirty who set out, eleven will never make it back. Following the stories of climbers from around the world, “No Way Down” weaves a tale of human courage, folly, survival and devastating loss. The stories are heart-wrenching: the young married couple whose rope was torn apart by an avalanche, sending the husband to his death; the 61-year-old Frenchman who called his family from near the summit to say he wouldn’t make it home. So what drove them to try to conquer this elusive peak? And what went wrong that fateful day?
Penguin 2010
ISBN 9780670918423
Hbk £18.99
Portobello Road: Photographed in the Sixties
John Petty
This book is a collection of photographs taken over a period of three years during the early Sixties. Visiting Portobello for the first time the photographer, John Petty recognized that here was a rare opportunity to record street life at its most colorful. Abounding in characters, his camera captures a series of telling moments in the life of the market. At that time Portobello was still very much rooted in the past: parts seemed to be locked in a 1930’s time warp, occasionally bordering on the Dickensian. The Swinging Sixties and the Carnaby Street culture had yet to make its impression on the market, although a few fledging hippies do appear in Petty’s portfolio conveying a striking contrast with the still firmly entrenched duffle-coated, sheepskin jacket brigade. Against this background, the photographer concentrates on the people who work in the market and those visiting this vibrant environment: the costermonger families – many going back several generations: The dealers in antiques, collectables, objects d’art and bric-a-brac; stallholders; street vendors, and the hawkers selling second-hand goods of every description; and, local families doing their weekend shopping, bargain hunters, browsers and the occasional overseas visitor, in stark contrast with the several thousand who now descend on the market every Saturday morning. And above all else, the children who made the market their own special playground. Well behaved – otherwise they would have gotten a clip round the ear – they roamed the streets unsupervised, enjoying the freedom and all the fun opportunities the market offered. These photographs contribute considerably to the worth of this book, which must be among the most complete collections of a time now considered by many as Portobello’s Golden Age.
Antique Collectors’ Club Ltd 2010
ISBN 9781851496105
Hbk £12.95
The Help
Kathryn Stockett
Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver…There’s Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son’s tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from College, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared. Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they’d be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in a search of a truth. And together they have an extraordinary story to tell…
Penguin 2010
ISBN 9780141039282
Pbk £7.99
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Monique Roffey
When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England George instantly takes to their new life, but Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation and the imminent dawning of a new era. Her only solace is her growing fixation with Eric Williams, the charismatic leader of Trinidad’s new national party, to whom she pours out all her hopes and fears for the future in letters that she never brings herself to send. As the years progress, George and Sabine’s marriage endures for better or worse. When George discovers Sabine’s cache of letters, he realises just how many secrets she’s kept from him – and he from her – over the decades. And he is seized by an urgent, desperate need to prove his love for her, with tragic consequences…
Simon and Schuster 2010
ISBN 9781847395221
Pbk £7.99
Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
Graham Robb
No-one knows a city like the people who live there – so who is better to relate the history of Paris than its inhabitants through the ages? Taking us from 1750 to the new millennium, “Parisians” introduces us to some of those inhabitants: we meet spies, soldiers, scientists and alchemists; police commissioners, photographers and philosophers; adulterers, murderers, prisoners and prostitutes. We encounter political and sexual intrigues, witness real and would-be revolutions, assassination attempts and several all too successful executions; we visit underground caverns and catacombs, enjoy the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower, are there for the opening of the Metro, accompany Hitler on a flying visit to the French capital – and much more besides. Entertaining and illuminating, and written with Graham Robb’s customary attention to detail – and, indeed, the unusual – “Parisians” is both history and travel guide, yet also part memoir, part mystery. A book unlike any other, it is at once a book to read from cover to cover, to lose yourself in, to dip in and out of at leisure, and a book to return to again and again – rather like the city itself, in fact. Praise for “The Discovery of France” include: ‘An extraordinary journey of discovery that will delight even the most indolent armchair traveller’ – “Daily Telegraph”; and, ‘A superior historical guidebook for the unhurried traveller, and altogether a book to savour’ – “Independent”.
Picador 2010
ISBN 9780330452441
Hbk £18.99
The Island that Dared
Dervla Murphy
Take a three-generation family holiday in Cuba in the company of Dervla Murphy, her daughter and three young granddaughters and you have a Swallows and Amazon like adventure in the Caribean as they trek into the hills and along the coast as a family, camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars and relishing the ubiquitous Cuban hospitality.
But this is no more than the joyful start of a fully-fledged quest to understand the unique society created by the Cuban Revolution. For Dervla returns alone to explore the mountains, coastal swamps and decaying cities, investigating the experience of modern Cuba with her particular, candid curiosity. Through her own research and through conversations with Fidelistas and their critics alike, The Island That Dared builds a complex picture of a people struggling to retain their identity in the face of insistent hostility of the government of the United States.
Eland Press 2010
(Signed copies available)
ISBN 9781906011468
Pbk £12.99
1492: The Year Our World Began
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
The world would end in 1492 – so the prophets, sooth-sayers and stargazers said. They were right. Their world did end. Ours began…
In search of modernity, 1492 takes readers on a journey around the globe of the time, in the company of real-life travellers, drawing together the threads that began to bind the planet. The tour starts in Granada, where the last Islamic kingdom in Europe collapsed, then moves to Timbuktu, where a new Muslim empire triumphed. With Porguguese explorers we visit the court of the first Christian king in the southern hemisphere. We join Jews expelled from Spain as the Mediterranean to northern Africa, Italy and Istanbul. We go to the afflicted Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the corrupt Rome of Alexander Borgia. We see the frozedn frontiers of the dynamic bloody Russia of Ivan the Great, hear mystical poets sing on the shores of the Indian Ocean, and we sail the Atlantic with Columbus.
1492 was our February 2010 Book of the Month
Bloomsbury 2009
ISBN 9781408800706
Hbk £20.00
Viva South America: A Journey Through a Restless Continent
Oliver Balch
Armed with a reporter’s notebook and an open mind, the author hits the road in search of answers. Cutting a path along the highways and byways of the continent, this book lifts the lid on the Liberators’ legacies and sniffs behind their modern-day statues.
With the ghost of Bol�var as guide, the quest takes the reader off the tourist trail and into the weird and wonderful worlds of South American culture and society. By stepping into people’s homes and into inmates’ prison cells, by climbing on to dance floors and over road blocks, Oliver Balch unearths untold stories from the front line of South America’s contemporary fight for freedom.
Viva South America was our January 2010 Book of the Month
Faber and Faber 2009
ISBN 9780571237043
Pbk £9.99
The Magnetic North
Sara Wheeler
Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers, Sara Wheeler uncovers the beautiful, brutal reality of the Arctic.
The Magnetic North was our Book of the Month in November 2009
Jonathan Cape 2009
(signed copies available)
ISBN 9780224082211
Hbk £20.00
The Great Cities in History
John Julius Norwich (ed.)
An unrivalled collection of essays by the world’s leading travel writers, historians and academics about cities throughout history. From Uruk, that rose and fell on the banks of the Euphrates to our expanding metropolises, each city’s peculiar characteristics and influence is illustrated. Essays by leading historians and writers include Timbuktu by Barnaby Rogerson, Budapest by Misha Glenny, Montreal by Rory Maclean, Mexico City by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and Moscow by Orlando Figes.
Great Cities in History was our December 2009 Book of the Month
Thames and Hudson 2009
(Illustrated)
ISBN 0500251541
Hbk £24.99
Monuments of Syria: A Guide
Ross Burns
This is one of the most eagerly awaited titles of the year, the subject of countless customer emails and phone calls. First published in the early 1990s it became quite difficult to find even thought it is the definitive guide to the region’s rich historical and archaeological remains. When we found out it was being republished we knew we would have a stampede through the shop. This edition has been updated and expanded with a new colour section but retains its scholarly edge with ample chronologies and glossaries. Essential for all informed travellers to Syria.
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