RESULTS IN BOOKS FOR ADULTS

A Summer in Gascony evokes the spirit, sights, smells and sounds of the other South of France with its strong spirit of independence, its love of the land and all the simple pleasures it provides - magret de canard, méchoui - and gutsy red wine and armagnac! The only travel-writing book on Gascony, this is a charming and humorous fish out of water tale of a young Englishman who spends a summer working in Gascony and leaves a Gascon in heart and soul - a love affair that endures till today. Full of fascinating insights into the turbulent history of Gascony with its strong English connection going back to the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet when it became the English Kingdom for 300 years. With charm and gentle humour, Martin Calder describes an extraordinary summer spent working at a Ferme-Auberge in a remote hilltop village in Gascony, one of the most rural parts of Southwest France stretching from Toulouse in the East to the Atlantic in the West, from the River Garonne in the north to the Pyrenees in the South. It is a golden land of rolling hills and wide horizons, swathed with vineyards, sunflowers, maize and pastures where wild boar and roe deer roam the oak forests. In the tiny hamlet of Péguilhan, Calder is introduced to the Gascon way of life, working in the fields, shepherding the sheep, watering the crops and discovers a unique people, proud of their fiercely independent heritage. This is a tale of two love affairs: an idyllic summer romance with his fellow stagiaire Anja and a lifelong love affair with Gascony and its village festivals, dusty roads, and sun-baked wine country. Full of colourful characters - the charismatic and convivial Jacques-Henri, the hardworking farmer and his family who take Martin into their home and hearts; the yoga-practicing Germans; Pattes, the mischievous and lovable stray dog who brings havoc in his wake; Madame Parle-Beaucoup the town gossip who has a secret of her own and the memorable Monsieur Fustignac whose pride in his Gasgon heritage is unforgettable. As an Englishman in Gascony, Martin finds himself more welcome than he expected thanks to the old affinities that exist between England and Gascony - after all Gascons fought for 300 years alongside the English against their common enemy - the French! Gascony exported huge quantities of wine - claret - to slake the thirsts of medieval Englishmen.

Travelling by bus, on foot, by mule and horse, staying with Albanians in their houses and crumbling Stalinist tower blocks, Robert Carver meets Vlach shepherds and village intellectuals, ex-Communist Special Forces officers and juvenile heroin smugglers, missionaries with jeeps and light planes, and ex-prisoners of Enver Hoxha who have spent forty-five years in the Albanian gulag. In the remote villages of the Accursed Mountains of the far north, he is the first Briton seen since World War II, when Intelligence officers were parachuted in to help fight the German occupiers. On his journey to Lake Gashit, high above the snowline on the Serb-Montenegrin border, Carver survives murder attempts and suicidal bus rides. He sees villages last visited by outsiders in 1933, which had effectively been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.

When Joe and his girlfriend Joy decide to trade in their life on a cold Lancashire fish market to run a bar in the Tenerife sunshine, they anticipate a paradise of sea, sand and siestas. Little did they expect their foreign fantasy to turn out to be about as exotic as Grimsby on a wet Monday morning. Amidst a host of eccentric locals, homesickness and the occasional cockroach infestation, pint-pulling novices Joe and Joy struggle with 'Brits abroad' culture and learn that, although the skies might be bluer, the grass is definitely not always greener. Dubbed 'Little Britain with a suntan', More Ketchup Than Salsa lifts the lid on the morning-afters as well as the night-befores of life in a busy holiday resort.

A mixture of biography, history and literary criticism, this is a study of travel, and of the concept of travel itself, and focuses on seven travellers, analyzing the relationship between their lives and their works. This book also addresses the idea of a journey as a quest or spiritual pilgrimage

Alistair Cooke, then a Washington correspondent for The Guardian, recognised a great story to be told in investigating at first hand the effects of the Second World War on America and the daily lives of Americans as they adjusted to radically new circumstances. Within weeks of the Pearl Harbor attack, with a reporter's zeal, Cooke set off on a circuit of the entire country to see what the war had done to people. He talked to everyone he encountered on his extensive trip, from miners to lumberjacks, to war-profiteers, to day-laborers, to local politicians - even the unfortunate Japanese-Americans who had been rapidly interned in stark, desert camps. Intertwined with his reflections on changing landscapes and cityscapes and with his unique storytelling skills and insight, his acute ability to define detail and catch the sounds and syntax of different regional accents, this is Alistair Cooke moving into his prime as a reporter and a writer. His prescient observations on what was happening and considerations on where America was headed provide a clearer understanding of a critical moment in world history just prior to the dropping of the Atomic bomb. This unique travelogue celebrates an important American character and the indomitable spirit of a nation that was to inspire Cooke's reports and broadcasts for some 60 years.

Peter's mum and dad are worried. Over the last 12 months, they've noticed ferocious changes taking place in their son. The problem is that Peter, who is 14, wants to be a musician - a rock star. Uncoincidentally, ever since the advent of this new ambition, Peter's grades at school have plummeted from very good to somewhere below mediocre. What is to be done? In the spirit of intellectual enquiry, Peter and music-critic, Tom Cox, set off in a Ford Focus on a journey to the dark heart of Britain's musical heritage, to get the inside track on whether being a musician really is a sensible career choice for a teenager.

Crawford's Much Have I Travell'd, the first substantial companion of travel quotations to be published in the UK, is a lively compilation of travel and exploration in all its guises, from the conquering of Mount Everest to the unforgettable words of the love torn lovers in Brief Encounter. It ranges from the ancient world to the present day including quotes from Alice In Wonderland, Spenser's Faerie Queen, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Blake, Dorothy Parker, Hazlitt, Samuel Pepys to novelists Austen, Henry Miller and Hemingway, resulting in a beautiful, intelligent and immensely readable book. With a scope that traverses Xenophon, Jules Verne, Marco Polo, the pioneers of the Wild West, Captain Cook, the Antarctic explorers, Neil Armstrong, Shakespeare, Dickens, Voltaire and other classical authors; alongside contemporary authors and travellers from Alex Garland to Sara Wheeler, this collection will take the reader from Persia to Wonderland via the rolling southern seas. An exhilarating mix of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, Much Have I Travell'd is the perfect book for anyone who has travelled or wants to enjoy the riches of travel quotations.

Indraprastha is the Hindu name for the first, mythical Delhi. In this book the author peels back the successive encrusting layers of Delhi's history, using both the material and the human remains of each period as a touchstone with the present. With each of the six cities of Delhi being revealed in respective chapters, the climax, the final chapter, tells of the mythical first city, whose beginnings, told in the Mahamarata, form the principle Hindu creation myth.This book is a portrait of Delhi, the mother of all cities. Its dry plains are the fertile meeting point of all the great cultures of South Asia, the place where Rajput, Persian, Afghan and British influences all intermingle.

Illustrated with photographs by the author

Nick Danziger began his journey in June 1994, as newspapers and magazines throughout the land commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landings and recalled the Allies' war aims (to 'afford assurance that all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want'). For the best part of a year, he lived among the homeless and unemployed in many of the ruined manufacturing and so-called 'no-go' areas of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. With courage and sensitivity, he won the trust of the street children and shared the lives and heard the stories of hundreds of society's outsiders. A powerful and disturbing documentary of life in the UK for a forgotten section of society in the mid-1990s, and a tribute to the resilience of individuals faced with overwhelming odds.

Having survived their voyage to Carcassonne, you would expect pensioners Terry and Monica Darlington and their whippet, Jim, to retire to a comfortable corner of their favourite public house. But no, they looked to the New World for their extraordinary new adventure...No-one has ever sailed an English narrowboat in the US before, for reasons that become clear during the nine-month voyage of the Phyllis May - including 30-mile sea crossings, blasting heat, tornadoes, hurricanes and all manner of intimidating wildlife. But the real danger comes from the Good Ole Boys and Girls of the Deep South. Colonels, bums, captains, planters, heroes, drunks, gongoozlers, dancing dicks and beautiful spies - they all want to meet the Brits on the painted boat and their thin dog and take them home and party them to death. And from the Phyllis May, a thousand miles of the little-known South-East Seaboard unfold at six miles an hour - the golden marshes of the Carolinas, the incomparable cities of Charleston and Savannah, and the lost arcadias of Georgia and Florida.