A fascinating portrait of China in the 1980s and 1990s, how the Cultural Revolution shaped families, and how the country's economic ambitions gave rise to great change. Xiaolu Guo is one of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation. She lives in London and Berlin. Her iconoclastic and completely contemporary voice gave us 'A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers' and 'I Am China'. Her vivid and poignant memoir is the story of a curious mind coming of age in an inhospitable country, and her determination to seek a life beyond the limits of its borders. She has travelled further than most to be who she needed to be. Now spurred by the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on her journey which began in a fishing village shack on the East China Sea. There her illiterate grandparents raised her and brought her to the city of Wenling to reunite with parents she had never met. She learned the dangers of being a girl. A young woman and aspiring filmmaker, she got herself to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions - a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home. Eventually, unable to make the films or write the books she wanted to create, Xiaolu determined to see the world beyond China for herself, and now after some 15 years in Europe, her words resonate with the insight of someone who is both outsider and insider. 'A certain nostalgia washed over me, and I try to remember the taste of the roasted silkworms on skewers that I had eaten so often as a child on those desolate afternoons after school. But I couldn't recall the taste on my tongue.' Reading like fiction, she brings to life her lifelong struggles against the chains of poverty, gender and censorship in her coming-of-age story. 366pp, photos.

Originally published in 1930 and aided ably by Lynd Ward's powerfully resonant wood engravings, this facsimile reprint is published under the Armchair Traveller Series. Rich in vivid detail, travel writing is almost as good as the journey itself. Stops include Tahiti, Martinique, Siam, Ceylon and the New Hebrides as well as the West Indies. Some of the book?s best passages are observations on 'The Englishmen in the Tropics' and Alec Waugh's refusal or inability to assimilate to those countries. Colourful descriptions of French colonial life and customs from the origins of Angostura Bitters to the scenic beauty of Jamaica, to the liaisons between white men and native women, further fill out the itinerary. The book is an evocative record of the places portrayed and an impression of the early 1900s attitudes and language. 'Four hundred miles away across the windward passage, Nugent, in the yellow-coloured residence in Spanish Town, addressed Dessalines, whom he described to Hobart as the brigand chief, as 'Your Excellency' and in the weary well-bred indifference of official English explained the terms on which Jamaica would be ready to trade with Haiti...' History, fine writing and exquisite woodcut illustrations depicting the styles and attitudes, people and nature. 304pp, paperback.

Exquisitely designed and produced by the Parisian publisher Flammarion, the cloth binding is embossed with hieroglyphics in this landscape format tome full of beautiful watercolours. As the day breaks spilling warm, honeyed light over Cairo, Florine Asch sets out with her sketchpad, pencils and paintbrushes. In her journey through this ancient and mysterious land she encounters the sandstone hills of Abu Simbel, the Pyramids of Giza, the baroque elegance of Cairo's grand interiors, a spring in the middle of the desert, sailing boats seen from the terrace of the Old Cataract, Wady Kardassy Temple at Nubia, the Isle of Carr Ibrim, makes a rendition of David Roberts' two painters, the Temple at Edfu, a turquoise earthenware sphinx, a shepherd boy, terraces and hotels, shops and people all beautifully drawn by her hand. From the tranquillity of a felucca floating down the Nile to the bustle of the spice stalls in the market, here is life in the city and the beauty of the desert all come to life under her brush. With handwritten captions throughout and short text, quotations and full page watercolours. 11" x 8½", gorgeous illustrations.

With beautifully designed flexicover and colour coordinated pages in red, orange, pale green and lilac, the book contains over 1,000 buildings including more than 50 additional projects, each accompanied with a single colour image, description, addresses, websites, phone numbers, whether exterior and or interior can be viewed, abbreviations whether they are commercial buildings, cultural, educational, government, public, recreation, religious, residential, sports, tourism or transportation buildings. Organised geographically by Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, there are hundreds of locator maps and one to three entries per page in this condensed travel edition contained in the 'Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture'. We can see into places now out of bounds like the Russian Federation Copper House built by Sergey Skuratob Architects, a brightly green six story apartment block in the metal framework or Atrium Architects' Boarding School in Moscow with its portico-like structure on inclined columns supporting a cascade of inner staircases defining the lobby. A fantastic way to appreciate what we see when we are travelling. Remainder mark. 472pp, colour.
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This book's stunning photos are presented in four sections, each of which challenges the viewer to a greater awareness of human diversity and resilience. "Frontiers" represents the isolated, remote and wild places "where people and nature co-exist and collide"; "Conflict" explores areas scarred by war; "Heritage" discovers how different cultures and ancient ways of life continue in spite of modernity; and "Community" seeks to understand how society is bonded together and humanity thrives. The author sees his photography, collected round the world over a period of ten years, as part of a wider method of storytelling, unfiltered and sometimes deliberately chaotic. Many of the images were captured at high altitudes, in inaccessible valleys, in jungles, deserts and war zones. Fisherwomen with baskets in Botswana seek to feed their families in precarious conditions, sharing the landscape with herds of elephants, while a beautiful sunset in Sudan captures a moment of serenity for the Mundari people who escaped with their cattle to the Sudd swamps on the Nile to get away from the war. High in the Pamir mountains of Afghanistan, a group of women and girls, frontier nomads in the Wakhan Corridor, are pictured milking their yaks. "Conflict" includes the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Palestinian Protesters burning tyres on the West Bank, and on a different continent a patrol of heavily armed rangers in the Congo, with the task of protecting some of the world's last mountain gorillas and forest elephants against the poachers who do not hesitate to kill humans as well as wildlife. "Heritage" features the Golden Temple of Amritsar by night and an atmospheric night-time street scene in Durbar Square, Kathmandu, home to ancient temples and ornate doorways. Illustrating "Community", a group of San children in Botswana are pictured with a large egg they have foraged, representing an almost extinguished hunter-gatherer way of life on the edge of the Kalahari desert. Walking the length of the Nile, the author finds the Nubians among the most hospitable people in the world. 224pp, colour photos on every double spread.

Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award, the book is sub-titled 'Travels Through a Lost Empire'. It is a lovely lyrical and insightful account with an overall message of optimism, that identity is as much about language as it is about location and religion. This ambitious travel memoir and history traces the footsteps of 'descendants of ancient minorities that were allowed to flourish in the empire, and then intimidated, ignored or expelled from modern Turkey.' Scott's mother is Turkish and her father British and what she explores is the contemporary influence of the Ottoman Empire on the wider world and its legacy across Europe and the Middle East. Alev Scott's odyssey began when she looked beyond Turkey's borders for contemporary traces of the Ottoman Empire. Their 300 years of rule ended a century ago, and yet travelling through 12 countries from Kosovo to Greece to Palestine, she uncovers a legacy that is vital and relevant, where medieval ethnic diversity meets 21st century nationalism, and displaced people seek new identities. It's a story of surprises. An acolyte of Erdogan in Christian-majority Serbia confirms the wide-reaching appeal of his authoritarian leadership. A Druze warlord explains the secretive religious faction in the heart of the Middle East. The palimpsest-like streets of Jerusalem's Old Town hint at the Ottoman co-existence of Muslims and Jews, and in Turkish Cyprus, Alev rediscovers her childhood home. In every community, history is present as a dynamic force. Faced by questions of exile, diaspora and collective memory, she searches for answers from the cafés of Beirut to the refugee camps of Lesbos and uncovers in Erdogan's nouveau-Ottoman Turkey a version of the nostalgic utopias sold to disillusioned voters in Europe and America. And yet diversity is the enduring, endangered heart of this fascinating region. 292pp, paperback.

Sub-titled '50 Places That Made Literary History', our literary journey begins in the British Isles and takes us to Paris, St Petersburg, New York, Saigon and Bangkok, and unearths the real-life places behind our best-loved works of fiction. Mourby explores 50 rooms where great works of literature first saw the light of day, from the Brontës' Yorkshire parsonage to the New Orleans of Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood's Berlin to the now legendary café where J. K. Rowling plotted Harry Potter's first adventures. In Italy we see George Sand, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, John Keats, Henry James and E. M. Forster. In Northern England and North Wales William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, Ted Hughes and Noël Coward, in London Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling; in Oxford Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien and William Morris. In East Asia Lascadio Hearn, G. B. Shaw, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Virginia Woolfe famously said that, if she is to write fiction, "a woman must have money and a room of her own". Here is the Room with A View that E. M. Forster coveted in Florence, but not every great writer or every room that has witnessed great literature had a view or has made it into these 50 chapters. H. G. Wells set one of his bestselling works Mr Britling Sees It Through in his own house in Essex. Olivia Manning used her own Cairo flat in the Levant Trilogy and James Joyce wrote exclusively about Dublin while sitting in his favourite Paris restaurants. Oscar Wilde liked to write and entertain in expensive hotels, but Hemingway and Noël Coward stayed in the best hotels around the world simply because they could. They could all write well regardless of their surroundings. 50 literary pilgrimages, 245pp in well illustrated paperback.

1,800 miles, eight countries and one incredible journey from Mexico to Columbia, this is a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller and travel and adventure writing at its best. The award-winning author, explorer and photographer Levison Wood has taken part in world leading expeditions on five continents and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and acclaimed documentary presenter. The British explorer has walked expeditions which have taken him from the Nile River to the peaks of the Himalayas and in this book he recounts a four month long trek along the spine of the Americas travelling with Mexican photographer Alberto Cáceres. Journeying from sleepy barrios to unexcavated Mayan ruins, Wood encounters personal stories, cultures and popular legends that paint a riveting history of Mexico and Central America. He takes family meals with local hosts, learns to build an emergency shelter, and witnesses the surreal beauty of the landscapes. He attempts to cross one of the world's most impenetrable borders - the Darién Gap from Panama into South America, a notorious smuggling passage and the wildest jungle he has ever navigated. Genuinely adventurous, this is an accomplished piece of cultural reportage that combines travel journal with history lessons, memoir and survivalist handbook. Beginning in the Yucatán and moving south through Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, we are taken to glamorous cities and ruins lying in unexcavated wilderness. Wood encounters indigenous tribes in Mexico, revolutionaries in a Nicaraguan refugee camp, fellow explorers and migrants heading towards the US. The relationships he forges along the way are at the heart of his travels and meantime he contends with the region's natural obstacles like quicksand, flashfloods and dangerous wildlife. 291pp, paperback with colour photos.

Cornwall has had a rich history from the prehistoric period, the Norman Conquest and the turbulent Tudor age, to the Civil War and the First and Second World Wars. The chapters of the book look at different parts of Cornwall: Saltash to Fowey, the Rame Peninsula, Truro, St Austell to Falmouth, Rock to Bude, Hayle to Padstow, Helston to St Ives, and St Keverne to Porthleven. Start your journey at Saltash, the first place people arrive at in Cornwall after crossing a bridge from Devon. Learn how the town grew around its waterfront where the ferry service operated and how, during Henry II's reign, a port was set up at Saltash for the export of tin from local mines. Travel around the coast to Polperro which is a popular holiday spot with original fishermen's houses dating back hundreds of years with a Royal document first recorded in 1303. Find your way to Penzance, the most westerly major town in Cornwall in Mount's Bay, and uncover the earliest signs of a settlement in the area (dating back to the Bronze age) including a spear head, a knife, pins and pottery. Discover Helston where Flora Day takes place annually on 8th May and visitors can take part in the Furry Dance whose origin goes back for hundreds of years. The book celebrates Cornwall's place in literary history from Daphne Du Maurier's books such as Jamaica Inn and Frenchman's Creek to Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse. Places for visitors to see in the region are celebrated, such as the Eden Project, the Tate Gallery in St Ives and Rick Stein's restaurant in Padstow. There are brilliant images included to bring Cornwall to life, from an early view of Porthtowan showing a tin mine on the horizon and a photo of Porth Bridge at Newquay where several prehistoric burial mounds exist in the area, to Marazion Causeway leading to St Michael's Mount and Marazion is one of the oldest chartered towns in Britain. Paperback, black and white images, 152pp.

On a journey through Europe from Turkey to Iceland, here prizewinning travel author Nicholas Jubber also takes a literary journey through our continent's most enduring epic poems, to learn how they were created and shaped by their times and how they have since shaped us. These monumental works were themselves created out of moments of seismic social, military and political change. The Odyssey tells of the aftermath of the Trojan War in 1188BC, a conflict from which much of European civilisation was spawned, although poem itself was not written until some 400 years later. The Nibelungenlied tracks the collapse of the Burgundian Kingdom on the edge of the Roman Empire in the mid-5th century but was not penned for another 800 years. The French Song of Roland and the Serbian Kosovo Cycle emerged from devastating conflicts between Christian and Muslim powers, and Beowulf, the only surviving Old English epic, and the great Icelandic Saga of Burnt Njal reflect other times of immense religious struggle, the shift from paganism to Christianity. Reaching far back into the ancient and medieval times that spawned these defining works the book explores how issues such as honour, fundamentalism, fate, nationhood, religion, sex, class and politics have always preoccupied the people of Europe. These tales, soaked as they are in blood, fire, violence and passion, show how the dragons, gods, emperors, knights and princesses that people them helped forge a European identity, and still resonate today. In his travels Jubber visits sites that feature in the poems and talks to a great number of the people living there about anything and everything, noting how, whether it is a conscious act or not, people continue to be influenced by these works and the subjects with which they wrestle. 322pp.