In 490 BCE Pheidippides ran for 36 hours straight from Athens to Sparta to seek help in defending Athens from a Persian invasion. He was hailed as a hero & his run stands enduringly as one of greatest physical accomplishments in history. Dean Karnazes honours this achievement & his own Greek heritage by attempting this ancient journey in modern times. His account of running the gruelling Spartathlon, fuelled only by the figs, olives & meats available to Pheidippides, will captivate even the most sedentary readers. ...

This is not a book about French Gardens. It is the story of a man travelling round France visiting a few selected French gardens on the way. Owners, intrigues, affairs, marriages, feuds, thwarted ambitions & desires, the largely unnamed ordinary gardeners, wars, plots & natural disasters run through every garden older than a generation or two & fill every corner of the grander historical ones. Families marry. Gardeners are poached. Political allegiances forged & shattered. The human trail crosses from garden to garden. They sit in their surrounding landscape, not as isolated islands but attached umbilically to it, sharing the geology, the weather, food, climate, local folklore, accent & cultural identity. Wines must be drunk & food tasted. Recipes found & compared. The perfect tarte-tartin pursued. None of these things can be ignored or separated from the shape & size of parterre, fountain, herbaceous border or pottager. So this is a book filled with stories & information, some of it about French gardens & gardening, but most of it about what makes France unlike anywhere else. From historical gardens like Versailles, Vaux le Vicomte & Courances to the kitchen gardens of the Michelin chef Alain Passard. There are grand potagers like Villandry & La Prieure D` Orsan & allotments & back gardens spotted on the way. Monty celebrates the obvious French associations of food & wine & finds gardens dedicated to vegetables, herbs & fruit. It is a book that any visitor to France, whether gardeners or not, will want to read both as a guide & an inspiration. It is a portal to get under the French cultural skin & to understand the country, in all its huge variety & disparity, a little better. ...

Another in our ” English Kitchen” series, this traces the development of Anglo-Indian cookery, in other words the curry, in English & Scottish cookery books from its earliest appearance in the 18th century through to modern works by Camilla Punjabi & Marguerite Patten. It wanders the lanes & byways of the British occupation of India, unearthing delightful accounts of Imperial eating & explaining how we have grown accustomed to the spice-box of the Raj. The broad intention is to reproduce early recipes for curry & accounts of Anglo-Indian food in their original words. The majority come from printed books, but some are drawn from manuscripts. The narrative traces our enjoyment of Oriental flavours from the 17th century through to the first appearance of a recipe for curry in Hannah Glasse in 1747. Thereafter, it looks at the various classes of cooks who produced popular & interesting recipes, from the female cookbook authors of the 18th century, to the club-cooks of Calcutta & London in the Regency, to the crusty colonels of late Victorian Engl&, & the refined French-influenced chefs of the fin de siecle & pre-First World War days. By way of coda, the authors consider modern recipes from authors such as Madhur Jaffrey & Sir Gulam Noon`s Chicken Tikka Masala, Britain`s favourite dish. The whole is ornamented by tasty extracts from past literature on eating curries hither & beyond. ...

Sometimes the hardest journey is the road home. Na Ga was always in search of a better life. But now she sits, alone, in a hotel room in Wanting, a godforsaken town on the Chinese-Burmese border. Plucked from her wild life as a rural eel-catcher, Na Ga is then abandoned by her would-be rescuers in Rangoon. Later, as a teenager, she finds herself chasing the dream of a new life in Thailand
- where further betrayals & violations await. Yet it seems that her fighting spirit will not be broken. But for how long can Na Ga belong nowhere & with no one? In the dingy hotel in Wanting she is forced to confront her compulsion to keep running, & to ask herself why, until now, she`s resisted the journey home. Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011.
...

A searing account of George Orwell`s observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire & Lancashire in the 1930s, ” The Road to Wigan Pier” is a brilliant & bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger & growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury & great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in Orwell`s later works & novels, & remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice & class divisions in Britain. ...

Running through the heart of Colombia is a river emblematic of the fascination & tragedy of South America, the Magdalena. Considered by some to be the most dangerous place in the world, travellers along the river
- for centuries the only route into the vast South American interior
- were at the mercy of tropical disease, dangerous animals & precarious barges. A third of the victims of `la violencia`, Colombia`s period of civil conflict which began in the 1950s, ended up in its waters. Townships alongside it have experienced some of the worst massacres in South American history. In 2011, Michael Jacobs travelled its whole length to the river`s source high up in Andean moorlands controlled by guerrillas. In spellbinding prose, he charts the dangers he negotiated
- including a terrifying three day encounter with the FARC
- while uncovering the river`s history of pioneering explorations, environmental decline & political violence. As Jacobs delves into the history of destruction & decay along the river, he also makes a deeply personal exploration into memory & its loss: not far from the river`s banks lies a group of townships with the highest incidence of early onset Alzheimer`s in the world. Jacobs reflects on the lives of his father, & his mother
- sufferers respectively from Alzheimer`s & dementia
- as he travels upstream towards what comes to seem like a heartland of mystery, magic & darkness.





...

No other bird is quite so ever-present & familiar, so embedded in our culture, as the robin. With more than six million breeding pairs, the robin is second only to the wren as Britain’s most common bird. It seems to live its life alongside us, in every month & season of the year. But how much do we really know about this bird? In The Robin Stephen Moss records a year of observing the robin both close to home & in the field to shed light on the hidden life of this apparently familiar bird. We follow its lifecycle from the time it enters the world as an egg, through its time as a nestling & juvenile, to the adult bird; via courtship, song, breeding, feeding, migration – & ultimately, death. At the same time we trace the robin`s relationship with us: how did this particular bird – one of more than 300 species in its huge & diverse family – find its way so deeply & permanently into our nation’s heart & its social & cultural history? It’s a story that tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the robin itself. ...

The Rock & Gem Book is packed full of photos of natural wonders, including rocks, minerals, gems, shells & fossils. This children`s encyclopedia displays more than 1, 200 full-colour specimens, from sapphires & rubies to silver & pearl, revealing the unique qualities of each material & how it is used in industry, architecture, art & science. Including precious metals, rare fossils, tiny gemstones & giant shells, the Rock & Gem Book gives a complete overview of the Earth`s naturally occurring marvels & the beautiful objects created from them. ...

The only conditioning book a rock climber needs! Rock climbing is one of the most physically challenging sports, testing strength, endurance, flexibility, & stamina. Good climbers have to build & maintain each of these assets. This revised & updated edition of the classic book, Conditioning for Climbers, provides climbers of all ages & experience with the knowledge & tools to design & follow a comprehensive, personalized exercise program. ...

An exploration of myth, passion & loyalty from the Lebanon`s troubled past, The Rock of Tanios is another superbly rich & rewarding novel from the author of Samarkand & Leo the African. Expertly controlling his multi-faceted narrative with prose of great beauty & power, Maalouf delves into the history of an extraordinary life: that of Tanois, child of the mountains. ...