RESULTS IN BOOKS FOR ADULTS

This guide describes Mark Abley's travels to visit the world's dying and threatened languages and the people who speak them.

Journey into the Arctic takes us across an environment which is one of the harshest, yet most beautiful on Earth. Setting off from Greenland, we travel by sled and snowmobile, meeting along the way the peoples and animals of the ice kingdom - seals, polar bears, arctic foxes and musk oxen. We learn how an igloo is constructed, and what life is like in an Inuit village. For the final push to the North Pole, we board a Russian icebreaker, shivering as the seamen take a dip in the icy sea! Bryan and Cherry Alexander are professional photographers who have spent many years specializing in photographing the glories of the Arctic and Antartica. They live in Dorset.

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for The Guardian beginning, 'It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment'. He has kept returning to September 11, in essays and reviews, and in two remarkable short stories, 'In the Place of the End' and 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta'. All are collected here, together with an expanded account of his travels with Tony Blair in 2007 - to Belfast, to Washington, and to Baghdad and Basra. 'We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism,' he writes: 'the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq ...Meanwhile, September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.'

Tony Anderson set out in the summer of 1998 to walk from the Caspian to the Black Sea, along the southern crest of the Caucasus. He was pulled along in the wake of the many tribes and peoples who had passed through the mountains, leaving behind a whisper of their deeds and names. He wanted particularly to visit the Georgian mountain tribes - Pshavs, Toush, Khevsours, Ratchuelians and Svans - to discover if they shared a common culture and to test the old idea of the Caucasus as an impenetrable barrier from sea to sea, with ancient tribes living in isolation from the outside world. From Azerbaijan in the east to Svaneti in the west, Anderson found communities where the old customs and beliefs still triumphantly survive, despite years of communist oppression and the terrible uncertainties since the collapse of the Soviet Union. From Khevsoureti he crossed into Chechnia to hunt bear. In Ratcha he found a community of mountain Jews that had lived in the mountains since the exile from Babylon. Everywhere he met with great kindness - even in Svaneti, where he was robbed.Throughout his journey Anderson refers back to many other visits to Georgia, to the politics of independence, to the war in Abkhazia and Osetia, to the civil war and Shevardnadze's accession to power, to the history of these people at one of the most significant crossroads of the world. One of the mysteries is how Georgia, devastated time and again by all the great vagabonds of history (Huns, Avars, Khazars, Lesghians, Mongols, Tartars) and torn between great empires (Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Turkish, Russian) has managed to survive. But survive it has with a vibrant culture still intact and, in the mountains, still deeply connected to its ancient ways.

Having established a moderately successful, but inevitably intermittent, acting career, including - uniquely - playing three separate characters in 'The Archers', Gareth Armstrong felt the need of a reliable side-line to cover the gaps. A one-man show seemed the answer - and Shylock a good subject. But no-one was more surprised than he by the way first his research and then the character took over his life. He has now travelled the world over with Shylock, from San Francisco to Sri Lanka, from Romania to New Zealand, his myriad encounters enriching both him and the show, adding ever more threads to his one-man story of the Jew. Frequently hilarious, often provocative, this account of a Gentile actor's exploration and discovery of the most famous of fictional Jews is fascinating, revealing - and always entertaining.

Received wisdom has it that Ibiza is an island of Union Jack-shorted beerboys singing 'Here we go, here we go, here we go' on their way to a 24-hour rave. But the reality of the island today is very different. It is, and always has been, a magnet for hedonists, but la Isla Blanca is actually a sophisticated, cosmopolitan island of enormous natural beauty - far more Jade Jagger than Jordan. The island's history reads like a history of pleasure itself. The Carthaginians established a cult there to Tanit, their goddess of sex, around 650 BC and named the Island after Bez, their god of dance. Roman centurions in need of a bit of down time between campaigns would go to Ibiza to get their kicks. Stephen Armstrong tells for the first time the fascinating history of this fantasy island. It is a story of invasions and migrations, of artists and conmen, of drop outs and love-ins.This narrative is framed by Stephen's highly entertaining experiences during one long, golden summer on Ibiza, an island where anything can happen - and it usually does.

In 1979 Asher read a book Arabian Sands by Thesiger which had an impact on him and turned him into desert explorer. He later said he had Thesiger to thank for the most valuable experience of his life. His wonder, admiration and Thesiger's influence over him led Asher to write this book.Thesiger was different from other travellers/explorers in that he tried to share lives and hardships of the natives. His aim was not be spectator but become one of them. Thesiger had rare quality among explorers - he ventured alone and found companionship with savage tribes of Africa and he tried to see the world through the eyes of these peoples. Born in Abyssinia in 1910, he grew up in imperial court.

When Patricia Atkinson first moved to France, her intention was simply to establish a vineyard. Over the years, however, she found herself becoming integrated into a way of life that, had she stayed in England, she would hardly have believed existed. Grounded in the rhythms of the land and the seasons, daily life in Patricia's south-western corner of France is dictated by a series of rituals and celebrations that we have long lost in our supermarket age. La Belle Saison is Patricia's eulogy to this way of life: a testament to the timelessness of the beautiful French countryside, the bounty of the land, and the generous-hearted French neighbours who showed Patricia that a simple life has many rewards. In France, every season is 'la belle saison', offering up its gifts to those willing to appreciate and look after the land.

What do the English think? Every country has a dominant set of beliefs and attitudes concerning everything from how to live a good life, how we should organize society, and the roles of the sexes. Yet despite many attempts to define our national character, what might be called the nation's philosophy has remained largely unexamined. Until now. Philosopher Julian Baggini pinpointed postcode S66 on the outskirts of Rotherham, as England in microcosm - an area which reflected most accurately the full range of the nation's inhabitants, its most typical mix of urban and rural, old and young, married and single. He then spent six months living there, immersing himself in this typical English Everytown, in order to get to know the mind of a people.

In the 12th century, Christians in Europe began to build a completely new kind of church - not the squat, gloomy buildings we now call Romanesque, but soaring, spacious monuments flooded with light from immense windows. These were the first Gothic churches, the crowning example of which was the cathedral of Chartres, an unparalleled feat of craftsmanship in which all the elements of the new style cohered perfectly for the first time. It marked a profound change in the social, intellectual and theological climate of Western Christendom. In Universe of Stone, Philip Ball explains the genesis and development of the Gothic style. He argues that it signified a new way of looking at God and the universe, as well as humanity's relationship with them. Informed by the rediscovery of texts from the ancient world, philosophers began to question old certainties about God's power and plan for mankind. This was the beginning of the argument between faith and reason, and of a scientific view of the world that threatened to dispense with God altogether.

Universe of Stone establishes Chartres Cathedral's iconic role in Europe's history: a revolution in thought embodied in stone and glass, a philosophy made concrete through the cooperation of theologians, craftsmen and engineers. It shows us that there are other ways of seeing the world and reveals, as never before, the complex workings of the medieval mind.