For a hundred and fifty years, between the plod of packhorse trains and the arrival of the railways, canals were the high-tech water machine driving the industrial revolution. Amazing feats of engineering, they carried the rural into the city and the urban into the countryside, and changed the lives of everyone. And then, just when their purpose was extinguished by modern transport, they were saved from extinction and repurposed as a 'slow highways' network, a peaceful and countrywide have...

One summer, writer and musician, Jasper Winn set himself an extraordinary task. He would kayak the whole way round Ireland - a thousand miles - camping on remote headlands and islands, carousing in bars and paddling clockwise until he got back where he started. But in the worst Irish summer in living memory the pleasures of idling among seals, fulmars and fishing boats soon gave way to heroic struggles through storm-tossed seas ... and lock-ins playing music in coastal pubs.Circlin...

The award-winning, genre-defining debut from John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and The Fault in Our StarsWinner of the Michael L. Printz Award • A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist • A New York Times Bestseller • A USA Today Bestseller • NPR’s Top Ten Best-Ever Teen Novels • TIME magazine’s 100 Best Young Adult Novels of All Time • A PBS Great American Read Selection • Millions of copi...

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZEThe original bestseller from the beloved author of UNDERLAND, LANDMARKS and THE LOST WORDS - Robert Macfarlane travels Britain's ancient paths and discovers the secrets of our beautiful, underappreciated landscape'The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on ...

Living in the wilder parts of Australia has its challenges.These are the true stories of one person's journey from Australia's suburbs to the remote northern Outback, and then to remote rural Tasmania.It is a story of deadly snakes, bush drumming, killer bicycles, Tasmanian tigers, and barramundi fishing.Compiled by Matt Flynn, a former Northern Territory journalist who also publishes fishing and outdoors magazines.

In Hard Light, Michael Crummey retells and reinvents his father's stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half century ago. Speaking through generations of storytellers, he conjures a world of hard toil and heavy weather, shot through with stoicism, grim humour, endurance, and love. This is writing that is supple and charged with intensity, language that vivifies --- electrifies --- whoever and whatever it describes. "Michael Crummey's lucid, dexterous writing shies a...

New York Times Bestseller: A Pulitzer Prize–winning author retraces the voyages of Captain James Cook: "Alternately hilarious, poignant, and insightful." — Seattle TimesCaptain James Cook's three epic journeys in the eighteenth century were the last great voyages of discovery. His ships sailed 150,000 miles, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Oregon, from Easter Island to Siberia. When Cook set off for the Pacific in 1768, a third o...

Life with New Zealand's remotest family in a follow-on from the bestselling A Life on Gorge River by Robert Long. In 2010, New Zealand met its remotest family, through the writing of Robert Long - aka Beansprout - and we were intrigued. Now Beansprout's wife, Catherine Stewart, tells her story, and answers many of our questions. Why did she decide to join him on the wild West Coast, two days' walk from the nearest road? Why and how did they raise their family there? Was it terrifying to be...

Robert Long and his family - wife Catherine, and children Christan (17) and Robin (14) - live in complete isolation, in a hut two days' walk south of Haast in South Westland. Robert has lived there for nearly 30 years; Catherine for 20 and the kids all their lives. Their only contact with the outside world is a helicopter or plane once a month, and two trips a year to the 'outside world'. This is the story of how and why Robert - known locally as 'Beansprout' - came to live at Gorge River,...

After two months on board a Russian container ship sailing 15,000 miles across the world, Josie finally arrives in New Zealand with her bike. Over the next nine months she cycles 10,000 kilometres all over North and South Islands while experiencing the wettest, windiest and stormiest year on record. During this time Josie was spat at, shouted at, honked at, and both run off and blown off the road. She got soaked, sunburnt, hailed on and snowed on and was alternately starved and over-fed, o...

‘Enthusiastic, pleasingly madcap’ GeographicalAdventure – something that’s new and exhilarating, outside your comfort zone. Adventures change you and how you see the world, and all you need is an open mind, bags of enthusiasm and boundless curiosity.Recommended for viewing on a colour tablet.So what’s a microadventure? It’s close to home, cheap, simple, short and 100% guaranteed to refresh your life. A microadventure takes ...

Born in 1981 and raised in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, Jonny Muir's early wanderings took him over the Lickey Hills, before he graduated to the giddier heights of the Lake District and Snowdonia.