Penguin Mother Land Theroux Paul

Setting off in his hometown, and ending up 'almost at the end of the world', Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express is a travel writing tour de force from one of the masters of the genre contains a new preface by the author in Penguin Modern Classics • 'The journey, not the arrival, matters' • The Old Patagonian Expresstells of Paul Theroux's train journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston's subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip, via pretty Central American towns and the ancient Incan city of Macchu Pichu. Shivering and sweating by turns as the temperature and altitude rise and plummet, he describes the people he encountered - thrown in with the tedious, and unavoidable, Mr Thornberry in Limon and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires

The Last Train to Zona Verde is Paul Theroux's compelling account of his final African journey • Heading north from Cape Town, through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Angola, Paul Theroux makes a final journey along Africa's western edge. The end of the line is the Congo but Theroux discovers that his trip's pleasures are tempered by a growing sense that the Africa which so long ago helped form him has vanished, along with the hopes of many of its people. Yet after 2,500 miles Theroux finds that though this will be his ultimate African adventure there are still surprises to be found by the traveller prepared to step off the beaten track

As mentioned in The Times Travel Book Club 2020 • Award winning writer Paul Theroux embarks on a journey that, though closer to home than most of his expeditions, uncovers some surprising truths about Britain and the British people in the '80s in The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain • Paul Theroux's round-Britain travelogue is funny, perceptive and 'best avoided by patriots with high blood pressure...' • After eleven years living as an American in London, Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise round the coast and find out what Britain and the British are really like. It was 1982, the summer of the Falklands War, the ideal time, he found, to surprise the British into talking about themselves. The result makes superbly vivid and engaging reading

The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's classic and much-loved homage to train travel • The Orient Express; The Khyber Pass Local; the Delhi Mail from Jaipur; the Golden Arrow of Kuala; the Trans-Siberian Express; these are just some of the trains steaming through Paul Theroux's epic rail journey from London across Europe through India and Asia. This was a trip of discovery made in the mid-seventies, a time before the West had embraced the places, peoples, food, faiths and cultures of the East. For us now, as much as for Theroux then, to visit the lands of The Great Railway Bazaar is an encounter with all that is truly foreign and exotic - and with what we have since lost

Dark Star Safari is Paul Theroux's now classic account of a journey from Cairo to Cape Town • Travelling across bush and desert, down rivers and across lakes, and through country after country, Theroux visits some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, and some of the most dangerous. It is a journey of discovery and of rediscovery -- of the unknown and the unexpected, but also of people and places he knew as a young and optimistic teacher forty years before • Safari in Swahili simply means "journey", and this is the ultimate safari. It is Theroux in his element -- a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere

A rich feast of travel writing, literary essays and fascinating interviews from Sunday Times bestselling travel author Paul Theroux • 'Wonderful... Evidence of both the breadth of Theroux's interests and his skill in bringing them to life' Sunday Times Culture • Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of work, Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances; from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life, restless and ever-curious mind

The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux • Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness

Winner of the Stanford Dolman Lifetime Contribution to Travel Writing Award 2020 • The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux • Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness

A ground-breaking portrait of the most turbulent century in English history • Among foreign observers, seventeenth-century England was known as 'Devil-Land': a diabolical country of fallen angels, torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. Clare Jackson's dazzling, original account of English history's most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis • As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering, foreign-leaning rule of Charles II and his brother, James II, before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army and a new order was imposed

A delightful book about Italy's unexpected history, told through its citrus fruits • The story of citrus runs through the history of Italy like a golden thread, and by combining travel writing with history, recipes, horticulture and art, Helena Attlee takes the reader on a unique and rich journey through Italy's cultural, moral, culinary and political past

Paul Davies' The Eerie Silence: Searching For Ourselves in the Universe is an engaging and lucid guide to the 'Fermi Paradox' - why isn't the universe teeming with alien life? • If aliens ever contact us, it will be the single most significant event in human history. And Paul Davies will be responsible for saying something back • For fifty years the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence has been scanning the skies. Now Davies, head of SETI's Post-Detection Task Group, with 'a rare talent for making physics mind-bogglingly vivid and exciting' (Times Higher Education), explores what the mysterious silence it has encountered could mean • Here he looks at exciting new ways to make contact with extra-terrestrial life. He considers what form advanced alien intelligence is likely to take if it exists

Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer - now in paperback • Benjamin Britten was Britain's greatest twentieth-century composer, who broke decisively with figures such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. Paul Kildea's biography has been acclaimed as the definitive account of Britten's extraordinary life, exploring his deeply held and controversial pacifism; his complex forty-year relationship with Peter Pears; and his creation of an artistic community in Aldeburgh. Above all, however, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into its unique alchemy as we are ever likely to go