After her epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle in 1963, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in the life of the sub-continent, working for six months in an orphanage for Tibetan children in Northern India. She fell in love with the 'Tiblets' - the cheerful, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children of the new Tibet-in-exile - but she also managed to explore India's Tibetan frontier, leaving the reader panting in her wake. Alongside her enchantment, Dervla became a perceptive ...

Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Through reported conversations she creates a vivid picture of life in this coastal fragment of self-governing Palestine. Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with the rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enj...

The Waiting Land is an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman in the spring of 1965. The third in a series of books tracing Dervla's involvement with the self-sufficient mountain cultures of the Himalayas, she is lured by the chance to work again with Tibetan refugees - this time a group of five hundred lodged in tents in the remote Pokhara valley. Once established in Kathmandu, and later at home in a tiny, vermin-infested room above a stall in a Nepalese baza...

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first - her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death. Here lie the roots of Derv...

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India. A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alar...

David Attenborough, Dion Leonard (Finding Gobi), Dervla Murphy and Brian Jackman are just four of the authors whose work features in this new anthology from Bradt focusing on true stories about travelling with animals. In Beastly Journeys, there are 46 tales of extraordinary animal travel experiences, from hilarious holidays with pets to journeys on which wild animals somehow came along for the ride, including: David Attenborough tries to get an armadillo through Paraguayan customs; advent...

At the height of The Troubles, Dervla Murphy cycled to Northern Ireland to try to understand the situation by speaking to people on either side of the divide. She also sought to interrogate her own opinions and emotions. As an Irishwoman and traveller who had only ever spent thirty-six hours of her forty-four years over the border to the north, why had she been so reluctant to engage with the issues? Despite her own family connections to the IRA, she travelled north largely unfettered by s...

Shortly after the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Dervla Murphy travelled to Romania and found a nation both exhilarated and bewildered by revolution. Eager to explore a country that had hitherto been inaccessible to outsiders, Murphy describes in lucid detail a journey on two planes: cycling and ambling through the rural Carpathians, and exploring the mind-set of a post-Communist society in the grips of an identity crisis. She is treated to tremendous hospitality wherever she goes, and in...

Accompanied by her daughter Rachel and a loveable horse named Egbert, Dervla Murphy journeys across Cameroon, discovering a land of astonishing natural beauty and friendliness. Dervla and Rachel are frequently mistaken by the locals for husband and wife during their time in the country, leading on one occasion to Dervla exposing her chest as proof of her femininity. They are, by turns arrested, drenched by tropical storms and burnt by the hot African sun. Yet at the heart of this account i...

Traveller Dervla Murphy and her nine-year-old daughter Rachel, accompanied by an endearing mule named Juana, clambered the length of Peru with only the most basic supplies to sustain them, spending most of their time above 10,000 feet. Their gruelling journey was marked by discomfort and danger, though mother and daughter remained resilient throughout, sustained by their great affection for the beauty of the Andes and impoverished people who live there. Eight Feet in the Andes takes the re...

In 1716, Mary Wortley Montagu travelled across Europe to take up residence in Istanbul as the wife of the British ambassador. For two years she lovingly observed the Ottoman society around her with an astonishing lack of prejudice. Her wide-ranging letters – about the life of Turkish women behind the veil, Arabic poetry, contemporary medical practices such as inoculation – remain as fresh as the day they were penned. A self-educated intellectual, a free spirit, a radical and a feminist as ...

Becoming a parent need to not put an end to wanderlust. That's the message in this new anthology from Bradt, the latest in a series of collections of real-life tales focusing on different aspects of travel. With contributions from a range of both well-known, professional travel writers and newer writers from the UK and North America, this engaging and entertaining compilation of 37 stories lifts the lid on the perils and joys of travelling with babies, toddlers and teenagers in locations s...