The very first maps, oral maps made by early Polynesian and Maori settlers, were waypoints, lists of places in songs, chants, karakia and stories that showed direction.Hundreds of years later, Abel Tasman made the first attempt at a physical map; followed more than a century later by James Cook, whose more detailed map was made as he circumnavigated Aotearoa. Once the detail of the coastline was filled in, it was the turn of the surveyors, explorers, rockhounds, gold diggers and po...

Extraordinary escapades from a late-life adventurer'Jo Morgan is a woman for our times. Fearless, determined, resourceful. An inspiring story of courage, vividly told with wry humour. A thoroughly engaging read.' JUDY BAILEYMountaineer, adventurer, avid motorcyclist and constant traveller, Jo Morgan has lived an extraordinary life.The youngest of eight children, Jo was brought up largely by her mum after her father died when she was only one, and sh...

Marco Polo’s legendary journey overland from Xanadu in China to his home in Italy has fired the imaginations of travellers for 700 years. Even today, traversing the 20,000km Silk Road between Europe and the Far East is a perilous undertaking. But it sounded like just the challenge for Wellington economist Gareth Morgan and his intrepid wife Jo. With five friends, they set off to travel the ancient route by a very modern mode of transport — motorcycle. Starting from the historic port of Ven...

In February 2012, Gareth Morgan trapped ten of New Zealand’s top experts on the region in a boat with 40 ordinary Kiwis for a month. Together with Geoff Simmons, he grilled them about the issues facing the region and Ice, Mice and Men is the result. What they found was startling. Our Far South – that part of New Zealand that extends from Stewart Island almost without interruption to the South Pole – harbours precious wildlife and is the engine room of the world’s oceans and climate. We are...

The acclaimed author of The Great Railway Bazaar retraces his legendary journey through Europe and Asia in this "funny, informative and lyrical" travelogue ( The Guardian, UK).Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his 25,000-mile journey by train through eastern Europe, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. Three decades later, the world he recorded in The Great Railway Bazaar

Carter writes as if he has ADD, careering through his life on oil rigs in exotic locations. He won't win the Booker, but his yarns burn with anarchic energy ... in a word, irrepressible.' - Herald SunHe's back on the rigs and back in trouble.Picking up right where he left off, Paul Carter pulls out more tall tales of a mad, bad and dangerous life in the international oil trade. Starting with action and mayhem galore This Is Not A Drill sets an unrelenting ...

A Silent Spring for our era, this eloquent, urgent, fascinating book reveals how just 50 years of swift and dangerous oceanic change threatens the very existence of life on Earth. Legendary marine scientist Sylvia Earle portrays a planet teetering on the brink of irreversible environmental crisis. In recent decades we've learned more about the ocean than in all previous human history combined. But, even as our knowledge has exploded, so too has our power to upset the delicate balance of th...

This is London in the eyes of its the homeless, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers and sex workers.This is London in the voices of Poles, Arabs, Afghans, Nigerians, Romanians and Russians.This is London as you've never seen it before.Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2016Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage 2019'This is London is an important and...

An eye-opening and vital account of the future of our earth and our civilisation if current rates of global warming persist, by the highly acclaimed author of ‘High Tide’.Picture yourself a few decades from now, in a world in which average temperatures are three degrees higher than they are now. On the edge of Greenland, rivers ten times the size of the Amazon are gushing off the ice sheet into the north Atlantic. Displaced victims of North Africa's drought establish a new colony o...

Humorous essays from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author on travel, late-life parenting, and other perils.P. J. O'Rourke, hailed as "one of America's most hilarious writers" by Time, is the author of the classic travelogue Holidays in Hell, in which he traversed the globe on a fun-finding mission to what were then some of the most desperate places on the planet, including Warsaw, Managua, and Belfast.In Holidays in Heck

“I look forward to the next Murray Whelan book with the same anticipation of pleasure that I feel for the new Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard” (The Sydney Morning Herald).Single father Murray Whelan thinks the life of a parent and political operative is complicated enough. His ex is staking out the moral high ground for a custody battle, and rumors of an early election are starting to fly in the upper echelons of Australia’s Labor party. When a Turk is foun...

Jeremy Kroeker is a Mennonite with a motorcycle. He doesn’t have a funny beard and he’s never even driven a buggy, but his family hails from the same Mennonite community that Miriam Toews fictionalized in A Complicated Kindness. From childhood through college, Kroeker attended Christian schools where he learned to think critically back to predetermined conclusions.Years later, when his faith begins to unravel, Kroeker stops short of tossing it all aside, choosing instead t...