Travel Writing Memoirs

Ray Walker had a secure career in finance until a wine-tasting vacation ignited a passion that he couldn't stifle. Ray neglected his work, spending hours poring over ancient French winemaking texts, learning the techniques and the language, and daydreaming about vineyards. After Ray experienced his first taste of wine from Burgundy, he could wait no longer. He quit his job and went to France to start a winery - with little money, a limited command of French, and virtually no winemaking experience.

To celebrate her 50th birthday and face the challenges of midlife, Jane Christmas joins 14 women to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Despite a psychic's warning of catfights, death, and a sexy, fair-haired man, Christmas soldiers on. After a week of squabbles, the group splinters, and the real adventure begins. In vivid, witty style, she recounts her battles with loneliness, hallucinations of being joined by Steve Martin, as well as picturesque villages and even the fair-haired man.

Different Natures takes you on three journeys. Each gives an honest and passionate insight into the evolution of a compulsive traveler. Looking for direction with the wrong eyes spawned Graham’s lust for wandering. The miles cleared his vision, and the hunger for longer distance grows with an insatiable appetite for new experiences.

The audio edition of On the Grand Trunk Road is finally available, revised and updated with new material. Focusing on Coll's journeys in conflict-ridden India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan as a bureau chief for The Washington Post, On the Grand Trunk Road reveals a little-seen area of the world where violence, corruption, and greed have had devastating effects on South Asians from all walks of life.

Rosie Schaap had a solid career as a journalist and a life that looked to others like nonstop fun: all drinking and dining and traveling to beautiful places—and getting paid to write about it. But under the surface she was reeling from the loss of her husband and her mother—who died just one year apart. Caring for them had claimed much of her daily life in her late thirties. Mourning them would take longer. It wasn’t until a reporting trip took her to the Northern Irish countryside that Rosie found a partner to heal with: Glenarm, a quiet seaside village in County Antrim.

In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.

In the powerful travel-writing tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V. S. Naipaul, a haunting memoir of a dangerous and disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's unhappiest countries.

Lynn Schooler had recently lost a dear friend and was feeling his marriage slipping away from him when he set out on a daring journey - first by boat, then on foot - into the Alaskan wilderness to clear his head. His solo expedition, recounted in Walking Home, is filled with the awe and danger of being on one's own in the wild, being battered by the elements and even, for two harrowing days, becoming the terrified quarry of a grizzly bear. But the formidable, lonely landscape is also rich with human stories....

Kristin Newman spent her 20s and 30s dealing with the stresses of her high-pressure job as a television comedy writer, and the anxieties of watching most of her friends get married and start families while she wrestled with her own fear of both. Not ready to settle down and yet loathe to become a sad-sack single girl, Kristin instead started traveling the world, often alone, for a few months each year, falling madly in love with attractive locals who provided moments of the love she wanted without the cost of the freedom she needed.

In 1976, after graduating from Harvard College, Mike Jacker embarked on a year-long voyage aboard Rhiannon with two friends named Louis and Clark. The three Midwestern boys had never experienced ocean sailing. Mike's captivating narrative takes you along on his remarkable adventures at sea and on land.

The color of one's skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience.

Raised in the extreme religious cult called the Children of God, Juliana Buhring was frequently punished for being a rebel and finally broke away. Her soul mate was an explorer seeking the source of unmapped rivers in Africa. When he was killed by a crocodile, her world went dark. To escape paralyzing grief, Buhring set herself a goal. Never having seriously ridden a bike, she set out to ride one around the world.

Nella primavera del 1976, a Hong Kong, un vecchio indovino cinese avverte l'autore di questo libro: "Attento! Nel 1993 corri un gran rischio di morire. In quell'anno non volare. Non volare mai". Dopo tanti anni Terzani non dimentica la profezia (che a suo modo si avvera...), ma anzi la trasforma in un'occasione per guardare al mondo con occhi nuovi: decide infatti di non prendere aerei per un anno, senza tuttavia rinunciare al suo mestiere di corrispondente.

Keith Foskett’s dream of escape started with a single step. When the long-distance hiker chose to backpack all 2,180 miles of the Appalachian Trail, he left ordinary life behind for five months. Enduring an incredible test of physical and psychological strength, Foskett was pushed to his limits....

Off Grid and Free: My Path to the Wilderness is the story of the journey Ron Melchiore undertook as a young man from the city, first to homesteading in northern Maine and then to living in the bush of northern Saskatchewan. He has lived off grid since approximately 1980 and speaks candidly about the joys and the tribulations of his chosen lifestyle.

Kabloona is a true story of a journey into the North. This extraordinary classic has been variously acclaimed as one of the great books of adventure, travel, anthropology, and spiritual awakening.

For 18 years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing's holy grail: to stand atop the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go.

No Baggage is a memoir that will resonate with adventurers and homebodies alike - it's at once a romance, a travelogue, and a bright, modern take on the age-old questions: How do you find the courage to explore beyond your comfort zone? Can you love someone without the need for commitment or any expectations for the future?

As a child, Maggie Downs often doubted that she would ever possess the courage to visit the destinations her mother dreamed of one day seeing. "You are braver than you think," her mother always insisted. That statement would guide her as, over the course of one year, Downs backpacked through seventeen countries - visiting all the places her mother, struck with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, could not visit herself - encountering some of the world's most striking locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother.

Gertrude Bell was leaning in 100 years before Sheryl Sandberg. One of the great woman adventurers of the 20th century, she turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world and became the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I. Mountaineer, archaeologist, Arabist, writer, poet, linguist, and spy, she dedicated her life to championing the Arab cause and was instrumental in drawing the borders that define today's Middle East.