The Traveler's Tale begins in a small village in Turkey where the protagonist, Jefferson Cooper, finds himself (despite himself). He has no idea why he is there, nor who he is. An apparent victim of some sort of selective amnesia, with a suitcase full of money and demonstrably a shady past, he sets out on a voyage of self-discovery. He travels to Istanbul, Mumbai, and Kerala, meeting all manner of people who seem to know him so much better than he knows himself. Along the way, he falls in love with a slender, ethereal person who keeps reappearing just when he seems on the brink of total desperation. It is Miryam who leads him to a realization of who he is and to his long-sought redemption.

Most of us, at various moments in our lives, either adopt a `tourist' identity of are framed within another's tourist experience. Travellers' Tales investigates the future for travelling in a world whose boundaries are shifting and dissolving. The contributors bring together popular and critical discourses of travel to explore questions of identity and politics; history and narration; collecting and representing other cultures. Travellers' tales oscillate between the thrill of novel experiences and unexpected pleasures, and the alienation and loneliness of exile in a strange land. The contributions review recent work on the discourses of tourism, travel and cultural politics; the effects of global interactions and local resistances, and the ways in which records, memorials and signs have all been used to describe the experience of encountering the `other'.

At twenty-three, William Simon Baekeland was well on his way to becoming the world’s best traveled person. The “billionaire” heir to a great plastics fortune had already visited 163 countries, but his real passion was finding ways to visit the world’s most challenging destinations—war torn cities, disputed territories, and remote or officially off-limits islands at the margins of the map. He earned rock-star status in the world of extreme travel by finding ingenious ways to bring the world’s most widely traveled people to difficult-to-reach and forbidden places. But when his story began to unravel, an eccentric group of hyper-well-traveled country collectors were left wondering how they had allowed their obsession to blind them to the warning signs that William Baekeland wasn’t who they thought he was. Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed and the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth delves deep inside the subculture of country collecting, taking readers to danger zones like Mogadishu and geographical oddities like Norway’s nearly impossible-to-reach Bouvet Island. Along the way, this raucous tale of adventure and international intrigue illuminates the perils and pleasures of wanderlust while examining a fundamental question: why are some people compelled to travel, while others are content to stay home? Mad Travelers is a perceptive and at times hilarious account of how the pursuit of everywhere put the world’s greatest travelers at the mercy of a brilliant young con man. Soon to be an HBO documentary.

Under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, all Albanian citizens had their own biografi, a file that was maintained (and often falsified) by the secret police. The information contained in a person's biografi could have devastating effects. When Lloyd Jones visited Albania in 1991, six years after the dictator's death, he heard rumours of a village dentist who, resembling Hoxha in looks and build, had been forced to give up his identity and become the dictator's double. Jones' quest to find Petar Schapallo gives shape not only to an intriguing traveller's tale, but a story about identity-changed, lost or falsified-in a country where identity was strictly controlled.

The “superb” time travel adventure of one lonely young girl, a remarkable family, and an impossible task, set between modern and Elizabethan England (The Washington Post) "A beautiful book . . . a form of enchanting ghost story, with the ghosts drawn in with the grace of a painter on a fan." —The Observer Penelope Taberner Cameron is a solitary and a sickly child, a reader and a dreamer. Her mother, indeed, is of the opinion that the girl has grown all too attached to the products of her imagination and decides to send her away from London for a restorative dose of fresh country air. But staying at Thackers, in remote Derbyshire, Penelope is soon caught up in a new mystery, as she finds herself transported at unforeseeable intervals back and forth from modern to Elizabethan times. There she becomes part of a remarkable family that is, Penelope realizes, in terrible danger as they plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots, from the prison in which Queen Elizabeth has confined her. Penelope knows the tragic end that awaits the Scottish queen, but she can neither change the course of events nor persuade her new family of the hopelessness of their cause, which love, loyalty, and justice all compel them to embrace. Caught between present and past, Penelope is ever more torn by questions of freedom and fate. To travel in time, she discovers, is to be very much alone. And yet the slow recurrent rhythms of the natural world, beautifully captured by Alison Uttley, also speak of a greater ongoing life that transcends the passage of the years.