Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Questura is shocked to hear that Brett Lynch, a friend since a murder case at La Fenice, has suffered a savage beating. The attack, in the beautiful palazzo home of Flavia Petrelli, reigning diva of La Scala, had come with a message: ` Don`t keep that appointment with Dottor Semenzato.` Then, with the storm clouds gathering fast over the city, a man`s body is found.. . ...

Discover the cuisine of a secret part of southernmost Tuscany, a sliver of land known as La Costa D` Argento
- the silver coast.
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How do the places we live in & visit shape our lives & memories? What does it mean to reside in different locations across the span of a life? In richly textured portraits of places seen from within, Nicholas Howe contemplates how places create & gather their stories & how, in turn, a sense of place locates the stories of our own lives. Howe begins with one of the finest descriptions ever written of Buffalo, that city on an inland sea where he grew up. He gives us a fresh Paris, viewed from the river below. & he depicts Oklahoma as a site of open lands & dislocation
- a place of coming & going. Howe then turns to Chartres, a traditional location of pilgrimage, to ask what other sites might still be capable of compelling visitors in secular time. He portrays Berlin as a scene of twentieth-century history
- & a city that helped him make sense of his American life. Finally, he writes about Columbus, Ohio, as home. Vividly rendering the places he has known, Howe meditates on the weight of home, the temptations of the metropolis, the fact of dislocation, the unraveling of history, the desire to remake ourselves through voyage, & the wonder of the familiar. In ways that too often elude travel writers, it is place that holds our imagination, that inspires much of our art & literature. ” Across an Inland Sea” evokes the various senses of place that can fill & haunt a life
- & ultimately give life its form & meaning.


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This is a true ` Boys` Own` adventure story of how three English schoolboys spent the summer of 1863 trekking through the Swiss & Italian Alps before conquering Mont Blanc. It is an utterly unique journal written by one of that party who would go on the become one of the great mountain & travel writers of the Victorian era & make a huge contribution to the Royal Geographic Society & the Alpine Club. His name was Douglas William Freshfield. Douglas William Freshfield was born on Sunday, 27 April 1845 in London, the only son of Henry Ray Freshfield & Jane Quinton Crawford. After being educated at Eton College & University College, Oxford, he followed his father into the legal profession & was called to the bar in 1870. One of the features of his privileged childhood was the opportunity to travel with his parents & enjoy long summer holidays abroad. At the age of eight he had his first experience of the Swiss Alps undertaking a journey from Basel to Chamonix. Eventually, in 1863, he was ready to undertake an Alpine adventure of his own planning. This volume, which he arranged to have printed privately in 1865 was his first work of mountain literature & also his rarest. It is his journal of that trek made from the southern shores of Lake Geneva, in the company of two schoolfriends, through the Swiss Alps & into northern Italy during the summer of 1863. Freshfield was only 18 when he made the trip, & in the narrative of the journal can be found the beginnings of the style & observational genius that was to serve him well over the course of his writing career. The reader is engaged at once with the three young men as they begin their adventure & is bowled along as an unseen travelling companion through the high routes & passes, the valleys & gorges until making the summit with them on Mont Blanc. It is an engaging & informative journal of how privileged young Englishmen once spent their leisure time & reveals a lifestyle long gone now but still worthy of reminiscence. ...

The island of Crete was home to Europe`s earliest civilization. Since the time of the Minoans, 4000 years ago, it has served as a crossroads where the Eastern & Western worlds have met & exchanged skills & ideas, materials & artefacts. At Knossos, with its gigantic palace complex where the legendary Minos was king & where Theseus slew the Minotaur, we find one of the world`s wondrous historical sites. From successive waves of rulers
- the Greeks, Romans, Arabs & the Empires of Byzantium, Venice & Ottomans
- Crete has aquired layered strata of history unlike any other l&. It is this heritage
- as well as the astonishing natural beauty of the place
- that has drawn visitors from around the world. Their writings are collected in this illustrated book, which is the first of three works together spanning the great island from east to west.



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On 21 February 1968, Wally Herbert & his team of three companions & forty huskies set out from Point Barrow, Alaska, embarking on a journey that no one had ever attempted. Sixteen hard months later they finally set foot once more on solid l&, having attained the North Pole & crossed the frozen Arctic Ocean for the first time via its longest axis. It stands today as one of the greatest expeditions of all time. Illustrated with unpublished photographs & other personal materials from the Herbert archive, this exceptional photography book is a first-hand record of an astonishing journey one that with rising temperatures & Arctic ice melt will probably never be repeated. An impressive team of explorers & polar experts, including Wally Herberts daughter Kari, also provide their reflections & tributes to the expedition & to Wally Herbert, contributing to a remarkable visual & personal testimony of this historic event. ...

The route from Port Augusta in South Australia, along the coast of the Great Australian Bight including the Eyre Peninsula & the Nullabor National Park, to Esperance in Western Australia, described by Moon Adventure Publication in a spiral-bound guide slightly larger than A5, illustrated with numerous maps. An introductory section to the area, covering its history & fauna/flora, is followed by advice on planning & preparation. The route is described in sections, each accompanied by a map of the area showing the road network with symbols indicating local facilities. Descriptions of places along the route include useful website addresses and/or contact details for 4WD tours, fishing & camping stores, recreational sites/providers, accommodation in remote places, etc. The guide also provides GPS coordinates for important road junctions & various other locations. Also included is a chapter on the Trans-Australian railway line from Pimba & Woomera to Kalgoorlie. ...

Olivia lives with her mum & her grandparents. She has a relatively normal modern family. The opening of a new Army cadets unit causes turmoil both at home & at school. Olivia wants to join, a decision her ex-army grandfather supports, but her pacifist mother is ardently opposed. Her best friend Aiden also disagrees with her decision causing tension in their friendship. When her mum is imprisoned for leading a pacifist protest, Olivia is forced to spend time with her dad who lives on Lindesfarne. The island feels far away & detached from the mainl&, almost magical. & even William, a young boy she meets there seems different... Is her mum ever going to be released? & what will Olivia do with her Future? ...

Across the Empty Quarter charts Thesiger's amazing journey across the inhospitable, vitually untouched Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. Restless & gripped by an overwhelming wish to make a name for himself in a world ever more hemmed in by progress & 'civilization', Thesiger (1910-2003) embarked on his amazing journeys across the Empty Quarter to test himself & to show what could still be done. The result was a monument both to his resilience & to the Bedu who guided him & who emerge as the book's real heroes. This extract is taken from Thesiger's Arabian Sands About this series: Penguin's Great Journeys series presents extracts from some of the most important classic travelogues in a compact paperback format. The series allows readers to travel both around the planet & back through the centuries
- but also back into ideas & worlds frightening, ruthless & cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent & implacable jungles, deserts & mountains, multitudes of birds & flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends & stories were treated as facts & in which so much was still to be discovered.
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Turkey lies at the crossroads of history. Since the beginning of civilisation, Anatolia has been crossed & re-crossed by waves of ancient people: the Hittites, the ancient Persian Empire & the mighty Ottoman Empire that spread as far as Budapest, Baghdad, Cairo & Arabia, have created a country as varied as it is possible to find in the world. With a climate & landscape as diverse as its past, Turkey has provided an alluring & yet sometimes challenging destination for westerners throughout the ages. This, & the hospitality of its people has ensured that countless visitors, from classical times to the present, have fallen under the spell of Turkey. ” Across the Hellespont” describes in lively detail the remarkable literature which Turkey has inspired for two millennia. At a time when Turkey`s position on the fringe may be set to change to a deeper involvement in Europe, the need for Europeans to understand the country is even more compelling. The range of travel writing represented in this book shows how, while political circumstances may change, the lure of Turkey remains constant. ...