When Mimi first started jogging on a treadmill as an unfit 36-year-old mother-of-three, she never imagined she would go on to become a World-Record-breaking ultrarunner. After coming to terms with the anorexia that had impacted her life from a young age, Mimi begins to reassess her relationship with food & finds a new resolve in running. With a renewed sense of purpose, she decides to take the sport that saved her life to the next level, training hard & throwing herself in at the deep end by entering the epic Marathon des Sables in the Sahara desert, despite still being a novice runner. One startling success leads to another, as she finds herself taking on ever-more-challenging races
- from the Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley, USA, to the 6633 Arctic Ultra
- all building up to her biggest challenge yet: attempting to gain the Guinness World Record time for a female running 840 miles from John o` Groats to Land`s End. This incredible story of how an ordinary mum ran her way into the record books will inspire beginner runners & die-hard marathon devotees alike, proving that, no matter where life takes you, it`s never too late to achieve your dreams & do the impossible.

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Beyond Limits is the autobiography of Steve Mc Clure, one of the world`s top rock climbers. From his childhood encounters with the sandstone outcrops of the North York Moors right up to his cutting-edge first ascents such as Overshadow (F9a+) at Malham & Mutation (F9a) at Raven Tor, Steve explores his deep passion for climbing & how it has dictated & shaped his life. Introduced to climbing by his parents at an early age, Steve quickly progressed as a climber, developing a fascination with movement & technical difficulty. Rapidly reaching a high standard, Steve became torn between the desire to climb increasingly bold routes & his hesitant approach to danger, with a series of close calls forcing him to seriously question his motivations. Searching for a balance between risk & reward, he struggled to find his place as a climber. Having dropped out of the scene, a chance encounter led to his discovery of sport climbing. Free from fear, Steve plunged headlong into this new style & surged through the grades. Pushing everything else aside, he allowed climbing to take over his life. He reached world-class levels of performance, but once again found himself searching for a balance between risk & reward, yet this time the risk was of losing what is truly important in life. As he searches for what really makes him tick, his climbing comes full circle & returns to where it started
- climbing for the love of it. Beyond Limits is the story of a climber & his obsessive exploration of the sport, of finding a true passion, taking it to the limits & attempting to delicately balance this passion against other aspects of life to give the greatest rewards.
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Harriet`s parents hoped that, after leaving boarding school & doing `the Season`, she would meet & marry a suitable young man. But she was to disappoint them. Just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, she set off for Peshawar to see for herself the plight of thousands of displaced Afghan refugees. Determined to do something about their dire situation, Harriet set up a small silk weaving project for illiterate Turkmen refugees, & was sent by UNESCO to Mazar-i-sharif to work with Afghanistan`s last remaining silk ikat weavers. During those years she was arrested by the KHAD, narrowly missed being blown up, survived acute bacterial meningitis in a Kabul hospital, & rescued an abandoned pi-dog puppy who became her devoted companion. At the end of the first Gulf War she travelled with the Peshmerga in the newly-liberated Iraqi Kurdistan. Then in 1994 she joined a group of unemployed builders & decorators driving convoys of food & aid from Croydon to the Muslim enclaves in Bosnia Herzegovina. Much has been written about conflicts in these countries, by war correspondents, diplomats & military personnel, but this is a different story. It is about young woman from a sheltered & privileged background travelling & working alone, in & around war zones, frequently with no financial or practical support, at a time of increasing Islamic fundamentalism. Harriet left her traditional, comfortable home & chose to live a life of adventure & danger helping refugees who had nowhere else to turn. She continues to raise money for charity through her business selling oriental textiles & remains friends with the refugees she helped in Afghanistan. However, she is now married, to just the sort of husband her parents always hoped for. ...

The sudden thought reverberated to the centre of Gin's being. It filled the emptiness in her nineteen-year-old heart, that of a girl whose marriage had failed & who was faced with a future devoid of hope. As a young girl from a wealthy family, Ginko Ogino seems set for a conventional life in the male-dominated society of nineteenth-century Japan. But when she contracts gonorrhoea from her husb&, she suffers the ignominy of divorce. Forced to bear the humiliation of being treated by male doctors, she resolves to become a doctor herself in order to treat fellow female sufferers & spare them some of the shame she had to endure. As more & more obstacles are placed before her, will she give in to social pressure or continue to fight against her world & her times? ...

In Beyond The Blue Horizon Alexander Frater reveals & relives the romance & breathtaking excitement of the legendary Imperial Airways Eastbound Empire service -- the world`s longest & most adventurous scheduled air route. Written with an infectious passion, this is an extraordinarily original & genre-defining piece of travel writing by one of our most highly respected travel correspondents. ` Whether being mown down by stampeding Baghdad-bound passengers in Cairo airport, or battling with Indian Airline staff (and failing) to reconfirm six vital going-on flights from Delhi, or being lured unwittingly into a souvenir shop selling pornographic wood carvings in Lombok, or hitting tropical cyclones Ferdinand in a 748 en route from Sumba to Bali, Frater rises above it all with humour, style & a wonderfully sharp eye` Evening Standard ...

Richard Skelton spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern Engl&. When not writing or composing music, most of his days were spent beating the valley`s bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams & walls. Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his observations & thoughts about this particular patch of l&. It is a poetic enquiry into the life of an seemingly inanimate landscape
- its otherwise unheard melodies & unseen movements. It considers both vast geological epochs & brief moments of intimacy, & in turn it asks us to consider sentience in all things, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. At the heart of the book is the fell wall itself: vast & serpentine
- a vessel for the lives, voices & myths of the landscape.

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Richard Parks has what must be one of contemporary sport`s most extraordinary & inspirational stories. Soon after he turned thirty, the professional career in rugby that had been his life for over a decade was cut short by injury, leaving him faced with an uncertain future. But unlike many other young athletes, Richard decided to tackle his fears, anxiety & depression head on, taking inspiration from Ranulph Fiennes & a line from his grandmother`s eulogy
- ” The horizon is only the limit of our sight” & setting out on challenges that have become part of his everyday life. Richard created history with his first endeavour
- the 737 Challenge
- by becoming the first person to conquer the highest mountain on each of the world`s continents & venture to both the North & South Poles within seven months. Then in 2013 he tackled three hugely challenging events
- an ultramarathon through the Peruvian jungle, the world`s highest mountain bike race, & a double iron man triathlon in Snowdonia
- in preparation for an even more extraordinary challenge: to record the fastest solo, unsupported & unassisted journey to the South Pole. These three challenges & the Antarctic speed record quest that saw Richard ski 11 hours a day enduring perishing conditions, broken skis & spending Christmas & New Year alone on the ice, were all filmed for a major four-part series to be broadcast on Channel 5 later this year. Beyond the Horizon is an amazing, inspiring, & exciting story for armchair adventurers, extreme sports & mountaineering fans alike.




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There are now precious few places left on earth with which we do not feel familiar, if not from first hand experience then at least from the perspective of the armchair traveller
- & fewer still where the camera has not yet prescribed our vision. An unrivalled collection of images of one of the last unsullied wildernesses in the world: the vast, uninhabited spaces of north-east Greenl&. These beautiful, majestic & poetic landscapes exist in one of the harshest environments on earth. Roy traces the historical background with a brief outline of Greenland`s early exploration. He documents the poignant traces of the Inuit tribe
- their winter houses, summer tent circles & graves & enigmatic stone mosaics
- & the structures left by the European trappers who once plied their dog-sledges in the lonely fjords. Iain Roy`s first expedition to Greenland was in 1982, to the mountainous region of the south near Cape Farewell. He was a member of a small group of Arctic enthusiasts who shared a love of wild spaces & whose ambitions were fuelled by the accounts of earlier pioneers
- early whaling & expedition journals & memoirs of scientists & trappers from the pre-war period. The group pooled their resources in order to reach remote corners of a faraway region that had become their common obsession. Roy himself has since made ten expeditions to the region.



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Sir Ranulph Fiennes has been hailed by the GUINNESS BOOK OF RECORDS as the world`s greatest living explorer. Following his most recent unsupported attempt to reach the North Pole which nearly cost him his life, he looks back on three decades of adventures in all corners of the globe & what he has learned from them. Reflecting on such diverse themes as the importance of choosing the right team, monitoring the opposition & dealing with the media, Sir Ranulph presents a breathtaking collection of photographs from his personal archive & discusses the
- sometimes painful
- lessons he has taken away from each expedition. From the famous & successful Transglobe voyage in the early 1980s to his life-threatening attempt on the North Pole in 2000, this is a riveting & enlightening insight into the life of an extraordinary man.

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What hope is there for Africa? Since the heady & hopeful days of decolonisation the story seems to be one of unrelenting disaster
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