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.

Our dear late friend ex-Python Terry Jones in his foreword says 'Did they imagine, as they took their poses, that their friends and families would think they had really flown in an aeroplane or a balloon or that they had actually owned an automobile?' Passengers on photographs travelling First Class, driving smart motorcars and motorcycles, with a backdrop of a deck of a ship, one of which looks suspiciously like the Titanic (plate 197), a couple photographed in the dashing speedboat on page 7, a jolly house party deciding to improvise a charabanc from dustbin lids and bits of wood! And he continues 'Why on earth did people have their photographs taken on the beach sitting astride a cut-out donkey?' (plate 58). In papier-mâché planes they brave the clouds or row through a painted sea in half a boat - the revelries of travel in the early years of the 20th century could briefly be realised in the dream factory of the photographer's studio and permanently recorded in the form of a photo postcard. Stern looking couples in the basket of a balloon in a studio in Blackpool, and aboard flying machines in Weston-Super-Mare and Southend, the sometimes huge caricature faces show the joie de vivre and sense of fun with captions like First Stop Berlin. 204 sepia postcards reproduced to the best possible quality, a truly nostalgic step back in time from this Oxford University Bodleian Library publication.

Published in association with English Heritage and with a foreword by Dan Cruikshank, here are over 300 spectacular photographs of London's lost buildings from English Heritage's archive and a detailed view of the city's lost heritage, its social and economic history, work, wealth, poverty and change during the years 1870-1945. Philip Davies's bestselling Lost London was described in the Sunday Times as 'A haunting portal into the bygone life of the capital.' Now some of the books finest photographs have been enlarged to poster size revealing the true quality. There are 100 previously unseen images in this new, larger landscape format tome. It reproduces historic photographs commissioned by the London County Council, many of them in the early days of photography, to capture individual buildings and streets that along with entire neighbourhoods were on the threshold of redevelopment. Haunting faces can be seen very clearly in windows and hoardings and shop fronts plastered with advertising reveal their wares and architectural features and textures leap into focus. Take the tram to Aldwych 1932, see Sir Christopher Wren's Court Room with its fine vaulted ceiling and fluted Corinthian screen, and see numbers 24-26 Jacob Street Bermondsey circa 1910, long before Bibliophile moved there in 1984! Almshouses, the ship's chandler in Limehouse, a street in Wapping 1906 with all the children lined up, many stunned at the sight of a camera, hovels in Millbank 1906 before demolition and the Blewcoate School, Westminster 1910. Glamorous interiors, shops, docks and wharves, markets and horse drawn fire engines with helmeted firemen, advertising and groups of curious somewhat ghostly onlookers staring the unusual sight of a camera. 16.25" x 11.5". The ultimate coffee table book, this cannot come highly recommended enough . 320 pages, over 300 spectacular photographs of exquisite quality and close-up detail.

From the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, Tokyo Imperial Palace, Fontainebleau Palace, Prague Castle, Het Loo, Frederiksborg and Peterhof Palaces, to Highgrove, Hampton Court, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, we travel from England, Scotland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, India, Bali (the Tirta Gangga) to Japan on a royal tour. Through beautiful photographs and vivid descriptions we discover the unique style of each luxury garden design from peaceful sacred water gardens to Moorish and Renaissance influences, and an insight into the theatres of politics, power and personalities that shaped these royal gardens. With layout plans and information about key plants, this global collection takes the reader on a journey through the world's most significant horticultural gems and ways of life from an historic past like temples and palaces and swimming pools and ponds nestled in rice fields and around natural springs in Bali, and all the colours and textures, grace and beautiful design only royalty could afford. The Taj Mahal in Agra is undoubtedly one of the most important monumental sites in the world and the greatest Indo-Islamic architectural achievement - and the gardens that line the banks of the Yamuna are a wonderful insight into the period of the Mughal Empire, their dynasties, traditions and beliefs. Exquisite colour photography throughout and a text by the UK's first garden designer in a wheelchair. 240pp, 24.77 x 29.6cm.
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From investigations into Mexican refugees to visiting a nudist beach with Jeremy Clarkson or a review of the last ever night at iconic Spanish restaurant El Bulli, these pieces of travel reportage bear all the hallmarks of A.A. Gill's wit, irreverence, perceptiveness and the cascading virtuosity of his prose. Savage and compassionate in equal measure, Gill was always opinionated, original and often surprising. This second posthumous collection of his journalism brings together pieces from near and far. He was ferociously well travelled: 'Abroad is as foreign and funny and strange and shocking as it ever was, and our need to know our neighbours every bit as great.? Wherever he was, in London or the Kalahari, Benidorm or Beirut, with the glitterati in San Tropez or the nightclubs of Moscow, in the ruins of earthquake-struck Haiti or in a camp with the displaced Rohingya, Gill had the ability to pin down the heart of a story and render it unforgettable. He was a peerless writer about food, so we also get to join him at tables all around the world, from a motorway service station café to the sophisticated delights of El Bulli. Another opportunity to marvel at his work. 368pp, paperback.

Sub-titled 'A New History of the People's Republic and Hong Kong', the rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule is told with unique insight in this new history, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures, and documents from archives in China and the West. We are swept from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars to the 19th century, the age of globalisation and the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. The story ends with the battle for democracy on the city's streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party. How did it come to this? We learn from private papers that Margaret Thatcher anguished over the fate of Hong Kong, sought secret American briefings on how to handle China, and put her trust in an adviser who was torn between duty and pride. The deal they made with Beijing did not last. The Chinese side of this history, so often unheard, emerges from memoirs and documents, many new to the foreign reader, revealing how the party's iron will and negotiating tactics crushed its opponents. Yet the voices of Hong Kong people - eloquent, smart and bold -speak out here for ideals that refuse to die. The book tells how the People's Republic reformed its economy and changed the world, emerging to challenge the West with a new order that raises fundamental questions about progress, identity and freedom. Hong Kong continues to compete with rivals and retain advantages - its banks, finance houses and traders grease the wheels of business and invest its profits with unique freedom, its courts arbitrate commercial disputes impartially and its administrators by and large do not have their hand held out. And we are taken back to the colonial days when the thwack of cricket balls could be heard on the green and at the Royal Yacht Club the noonday gun as immortalised in Noel Coward's song 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen' sounds. It is a hive of commerce - vendors of ivory, dried fish, abalone and sharks' fins, fragrant mushrooms and chests of aromatic tea, ginseng roots and the calls of porters and the babel of dialects. A delightful piece of writing and research which depicts the motives, fears and internal struggles of negotiating tactics, this is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the world in which we live. 456pp, colour photos, portraits and black and white images, maps, 2021 first edition.