Armchair Travel in 2021
Travel the world without ever leaving your home! With certain travel restrictions still in place, this is turning out to be the summer of the staycation! But if you want to explore lands slightly more distant, you can do so in the pages of a good travel-writing book.
There are some fantastic travel books in stock at the moment, both recently published as well as more classic titles. Nothing quite beats the feeling of curling up in your favourite armchair while it lashes rain outside (in typical Irish summer style) and letting your mind take flight while reading about different cultures and landscapes. Check out some of our favourites below or have a browse through our travel writing section!
In the last thirty years Rosita Boland has visited some of the most remote parts of the globe carrying little more than a battered rucksack and a diary. Documenting nine journeys from nine different moments in her life, Elsewhere reveals how exploring the world - and those we meet along the way - can dramatically shape the course of a person's life.
In Outlandish, acclaimed travel writer Nick Hunt takes us across landscapes that should not be there, wildernesses found in Europe yet seemingly belonging to far-off continents: a patch of Arctic tundra in Scotland; the continent's largest surviving remnant of primeval forest in Poland and Belarus; Europe's only true desert in Spain; and the fathomless grassland steppes of Hungary.
Exploration has never been more popular and any idea that there is nowhere left to explore is instantly disproved by the contemporary explorers who are showcased here. Most of the accounts are written by the explorers themselves, and they all vividly describe challenging and extraordinary expeditions to some of the remotest parts of the world, in extremes of temperature and aridity, often alone and on the edge of danger.
One sunny spring morning in the 1970s, an unlikely Englishman set out on a pilgrimage that would take him across the entire length of Japan. Travelling only along small back roads, Alan Booth travelled on foot from Soya, the country's northernmost tip, to Sata in the extreme south, traversing three islands and some 2,000 miles of rural Japan. His mission: 'to come to grips with the business of living here,' after having spent most of his adult life in Tokyo.