Do What the Boss Says: Stories of Family and Childhood is a collection of short-short stories exploring the adult-child dynamic. A daughter nervously visits her father who has now become a stranger; a young Irish girl substitutes a cardboard cut-out for her presence within her own family; a naive schoolboy is tricked by a more streetwise passer-by; a child tries to impress her village by breaking the world record for stepping in and out of a doorway. This chapbook offers you a kal...

As an avid traveler for most of his adult life, author Michael Loveday has always been keen to soak up all he can about the essence of places from more unconventional sources. Not for him the pre-packaged official line served up by tourist companies, visitor guides and the like. In Big Yellow ?????, Loveday presents an unofficial travel guide - perhaps guerilla tourism. He doesnt include the choreographed, scripted, shepherded travel, packaged conveniently by tour companies and delivered c...

Bill Bryson’s first travel book, The Lost Continent, was unanimously acclaimed as one of the funniest books in years. In Neither Here nor There he brings his unique brand of humour to bear on Europe as he shoulders his backpack, keeps a tight hold on his wallet, and journeys from Hammerfest, the northernmost town on the continent, to Istanbul on the cusp of Asia. Fluent in, oh, at least one language, he retraces his travels as a student twenty years before.Whether...

This true and very funny story involving six colleagues, some retired, proves the saying that we never really grow up - we just learn how to behave in public.On a sudden whim six men, mostly writers, decided to embark on a 1 000 kilometre cycle ride down the River Danube believing it would be downhill all the way. This was the first of many assumptions that proved to be not terribly correct.None had cycled since childhood nor even owned a bike.That first hilarious journey o...

Spring 1993. 14 months earlier the USSR had collapsed and with Russia accessible once more Gregory Yeoman and his expedition companions set off on their bicycles to ride from the Baltic to the Pacific. Over 153 days they encountered wild landscapes, wild people, crumbling hotels and Siberia's two cheeses on an extraordinary adventure through a nation finding itself after 70 years of Communism.'Riding into the Sunrise' is the story of the first cycling expedition to cross the new po...

Once 'the Paris of the East', Bucharest in 1989 is a world of danger, repression and corruption, but also of intensity and ravaged beauty. As Ceausescu's demolition squads race to destroy the old city and replace it with a sinister Stalinist Legoland, its inhabitants live out communism's dying days not knowing how or where things will end. In 'The Last Hundred Days' a young English student arrives in Bucharest to take up a job he never applied for and whose duties are never made clear. He ...

'Fascinating and hugely entertaining'Daily Telegraph'It's not like other comedians' memoirs. It's funny'GuardianThe Sayles might not have been the only Jewish atheist communist family in Liverpool, but Alexei knew from an early age that they were one of the more eccentric.Born on the day egg rationing came to an end, Alexei was the only child of Joe, an affable trade unionist who led the family on rai...

'Theatre, food, refugees: in Adrian's writing they're all linked up ... If you haven't read his book AA GILL IS AWAY, read it now. It was when he was away that he was at his best' Stephen DaldryA. A. Gill was probably the most read columnist in Britain. Every weekend he entertained readers of the SUNDAY TIMES with his biting observations on television and his unsparing, deeply knowledgeable restaurant reviews. Even those who objected to his opinio...

No. 1 bestseller and superstar doing what he does best, introducing millions of avid readers to little-known peoples and places.Until the early 1990s, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, travelling behind the iron curtain was never easy. In undertaking his new journey through Eastern Europe, breathing in its rich history, and exquisite sights and talking to its diverse peoples, Michael fills what has been a void in his own experience and that of very many othe...

'Well now, prove it, Sheila. As John would say, "Put your money where your mouth is." Be a depressed widow boring the arse off everyone, or get on with life. Your choice.'In The Two of Us Sheila Hancock relived her life with John Thaw - years packed with love and family, work and houses, delight and despair. And then she looked ahead. What next? Gardening, grannying and grumbling, while they all had their pleasures, weren't going to fill the aching void that John had left....

Thunder and Sunshine is the sequel to the best-selling Moods of Future Joys.At the age of 24, Alastair Humphreys left England in August 2001 to cycle round the world. By the time he arrived back home, four years later, he had ridden 46,000 miles across in just over 1500 days, through five continents and 60 countries on a tiny budget of just £7,000.His journey, as well as a quest for adventure, helped to raise the profile of the charity

In 1933, the eighteen year old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out in a pair of hobnailed boots to chance and charm his way across Europe, like a tramp, a pilgrim or a wandering scholar. The books he later wrote about this walk, A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and the posthumous The Broken Road are a half-remembered, half-reimagined journey through cultures now extinct, landscapes irrevocably altered by the traumas of the twentieth century. Aged eighte...