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.

With a touch of Bill Bryson’s humour, this wacky, fun book takes readers on a fascinating journey to parts of the world that few people visit. The Ten-Letter Countries is a story of a unique blend of countries visited by David based solely on their spelling.... David Jenkins is The Alphabet Traveller. Having previously made an 85 000 mile journey to visit all countries in the world whose names are made up of four letters, David is now off to explore 12 countries which all have ten letters to their name. He heads to Bangladesh in search of the elusive Bengal tiger but disaster strikes quickly and worse is to follow. After a bungled attempt to break into a Luxembourg jail he sets off to cross the Stans of Central Asia by horse, jeep and bicycle only to stumble upon the world’s most notorious heroin trail. Assaulted by customs officials and hi-jacked at gunpoint, he manages to escape across the mountains and make it safely over the Steppes in a Lada full of vodka. To a land of oil, pelicans and naked men beating themselves with branches. He follows the Silk Road and the spread of Islam to the deserts of Mauritania and makes the rail journey of a lifetime through the mountains of tiny Montenegro. In the sparkling Indian Ocean he uncovers the sinister side of the seductive Seychelles, finds himself at the helm of an aircraft over the islands of Mozambique and takes a razor attack in his stride to enjoy the wacky wildlife of magical Madagascar…David Jenkins hitchhiked to France the day he left school and has trotted the globe ever since. He has waited tables in Switzerland, sprayed crops in Israel, crewed yachts around the Pacific and cleaned urinals at Sydney Cricket Ground. He became a professor in Japan and then ran a business school in Rio de Janeiro before setting up his own company delivering newspapers across Africa. Now based in Cambridge, David’s first book The Four-Letter Countries, was widely featured in the national media.

A collection of anecdotes for each day of the year on the subject of travel and exploration from Charles Darwin, Michael Palin, Evelyn Waugh, and others. With an emphasis on the period 1750–1950—the classic era of both European exploration and diary-writing—this anthology features excerpts that convey men and women’s experiences of travel and discovery from the sixteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. The authors of the pieces range from famous explorers such as Captains Cook and Scott to modern travel writers journeying through the contemporary world, from people who pushed back the boundaries of geographical knowledge to people who wrote about what they did on their summer holidays. The book includes an introduction, explanatory notes and mini-biographies of all the contributors, including: Gertrude Bell (woman traveller in the Middle East) James Boswell (travels in Scotland and the Hebrides) William Cobbett (Rural Rides through England) Christopher Columbus (journals of his voyages to America) Charles Darwin (Voyage of the Beagle) Captain James Cook (voyages in the Pacific) Washington Irving (American writer travelled in Europe in first decades of nineteenth century) Edward Lear (landscape painter and nonsense writer produced journals of his travels in Greece, Corsica, Near East etc) Lewis & Clark (journals of famous journey of American exploration) William Morris (wrote a journal of a trip to Iceland in 1870s) Michael Palin (a Python abroad) Mungo Park (African explorer in early nineteenth century) Captain Robert Falcon Scott (doomed journey to South Pole) Evelyn Waugh (diaries of 1930s travels in Mediterranean and beyond) William John Wills (explorer of Australia)