Search results for ""Author Sara Wheeler""

Squeezed in between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide - not a country which lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler found out when she travelled alone with two carpetbags from the top to the bottom, form the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica.This is Sara Wheeler's account of a six-month odyssey which included Christmas Day at 13,000 feet with a llama sandwich, a sex hotel in Santiago and a trip round Cape Horn delivering a coffin. Eloquent, astute and amusing, CHILE: TRAVELS IN A THIN COUNTRY confirms Sara Wheeler's place in the front rank of today's travel writers.

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A modern classic on exploring and understanding the Antarctic, the most uncharted place on our planet. Terra Incognita is a meditation on the landscape, myths and history of one of the remotest parts of the globe, as well as an encounter with the international temporary residents of the region - living in close confinement despite the surrounding acres of white space - and the mechanics of day-to-day life in extraordinary conditions. Through Sara Wheeler, the Antarctic is revealed, in all its seductive mystery.'Antarctica could hope for no better chronicler: spirited, humorous and highly intelligent, she is also a writer of rare talent' Observer

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Britain's foremost woman travel writer Sara Wheeler records her life of adventure, from the Antarctic to Zanzibar'Funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel' Daily Telegraph'Intrepid and sparky, full of canny quips and lightly poetic observations' Mail on Sunday'Magnificent and unusual' Viv Groskop, Spectator Sara Wheeler is Britain's foremost woman travel writer. Glowing Still is the story of her travelling life - what is 'important, revealing or funny' - in a notoriously testosterone-laden field. Growing up among blue-collar Conservatives in Bristol where 'we didn't know anyone who wasn't like us', Wheeler knew she needed to get away. In her twenties she began a dramatic escape: Pole to Pole, via Poland. Glowing Still recalls happy days on India's Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal po

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Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover - Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford, he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. Sara Wheeler reveals the truth behind his love affairs with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl Markham, and - famously - with Karen Blixen, a romance immortalised in her memoir Out of Africa. 'No one who ever met him', his Times obituary concluded, 'whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell'.

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Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959) was one of the youngest members of Captain Scott's final expedition to the Antarctic. Cherry undertook an epic journey in the Antarctic winter to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin. The temperature fell to seventy below, it was dark all the time, his teeth shattered in the cold and the tent blew away. 'But we kept our tempers,' Cherry wrote, 'even with God.'After serving in the First War Cherry was invalided home, and with the zealous encouragement of his neighbour Bernard Shaw he wrote a masterpiece. In The Worst Journey in the World Cherry transformed tragedy and grief into something fine. But as the years unravelled he faced a terrible struggle against depression, breakdown and despair, haunted by the possibility that he could have saved Scott and his companions. This is the first biography of Cherry. Sara Wheeler, who has travelled extensively in the Antarctic, has had unrestricted access to new material and the full co-operation of Cherry's family.

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Willa Cather’s best-loved novel, and the final book in the Great Plains trilogy, is a beautiful portrayal of friendship, longing and growing up in frontier Nebraska. When young orphan Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, he finds himself growing up alongside Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. Their childhoods are full of shared adventures but as they grow their paths diverge, spurred on by the dire poverty of the Shimerda family. Yet Jim will never forget Ántonia, spellbound by her strength and remarkable free spirit. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TRAVEL WRITER SARA WHEELER

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Britain's foremost woman travel writer Sara Wheeler records her life of adventure, from the Antarctic to ZanzibarA Times Literary Supplement and Financial Times Book of the Year'Funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel' Daily Telegraph'Intrepid and sparky, full of canny quips and lightly poetic observations' Mail on SundaySara Wheeler is Britain's foremost woman travel writer. Glowing Still is the story of her travelling life - what is 'important, revealing or funny' - in a notoriously testosterone-laden field. Growing up among blue-collar Conservatives in Bristol where 'we didn't know anyone who wasn't like us', Wheeler knew she needed to get away. In her twenties she began a dramatic escape: Pole to Pole, via Poland. Glowing Still recalls happy days on India's Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!); and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl. Corralling reindeer with the Sámi in Arctic Sweden and towing her baby on a sledge, a helpful herdsman advised her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing.Launching at Nubility, Wheeler voyages, via small children, to the welcoming port of Invisibility (she leaves Immobility for the next volume). As she writes in the introduction, when she set sail 'Role models were scarce in the travel-writing game.' But advancing years usher in unheralded freedoms, and journey's end finds Wheeler at peace among Zanzibar dhows, contemplating our connection with other lives - the irreplaceable value that travel brings - and paying homage to her heroines, among them Martha Gellhorn, the ineffable war correspondent who furnishes Wheeler's epigraph: 'I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.'

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'Conjures the rasp of the ski runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights' Sara Wheeler '[An] astonishing, haunting memoir' Isabella Tree The rediscovered classic memoir - the mesmerizingly beautiful account of one woman's year spent living in a remote hut in the Arctic In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable home for a year with her husband on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. On arrival she is shocked to realise that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape and the lack of supplies... But after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty. This luminous classic memoir tells of her inspiring journey to freedom and fulfilment in the adventure of a lifetime. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe Translated by Jane Degras With a foreword by Sara Wheeler Born in 1897, CHRISTIANE RITTER was an Austrian artist and author. She wrote A Woman in the Polar Night on her return to Austria from Spitsbergen in 1934. It has since become a classic of travel writing, never going out of print in German and being translated into seven other languages. 'A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone,' she would say in her later years. 'Then you will come to realise what's important in life and what isn't.' Ritter died in Vienna in 2000 at the age of 103.

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