Bøker av Sara Wheeler

Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. He was a soldier in the East Africa Campaign, a white hunter, a farmer, a pilot, the epitome of the brave pioneer. This book tells the story of his love affair, and talks about the life of one of the key figures in the mythic story of the British settlers in East Africa.

In O My America!, the travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler embarks on a journey across the United States, guided by the adventures of six women who reinvented themselves as they chased the frontier west.Wheeler's career has propelled her from pole to pole-camping in Arctic igloos, tracking Indian elephants, contemplating East African swamps so hot that toads explode-but as she stared down the uncharted territory of middle age, she found herself in need of a guide. "Fifty is a tough age," she writes. "Role models are scarce for women contemplating a second act." Scarce, that is, until she stumbled upon Fanny Trollope.In 1827, Fanny, mother of Anthony, swapped England for Ohio with hopes of bolstering the family finances. There, failure and disappointment hounded the immigrant for three years before she returned home to write one of the most sensational travel accounts of the nineteenth century. Domestic Manners of the Americans made an instant splash on both sides of the Atlantic, where readers both relished and reviled Trollope's caustic take on the newly independent country. Her legacy became the stuff of legend: "Trollopize" emerged as a verb meaning "to abuse the American nation"; Mark Twain judged her the best foreign commentator on his country; the last king of France threw a ball in her honor. Fanny Trollope was forty-nine when she set out for America, and Wheeler, approaching fifty herself, was smitten. Fanny was living proof of life after fertility, and she led Wheeler to other trailblazers: the actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, the radical sociologist Harriet Martineau, the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, the traveler Isabella Bird, and the novelist Catherine Hubback-women born within half a century of one another who all reinvented themselves in a transforming America, the land of new beginnings.In O My America!, Wheeler tracks her subjects from the Mississippi to the cinder cones of the Mayacamas at the tail end of the Cascades, armed with two sets of maps for each adventure: one current and one the women before her would have used. Bright, spirited, and tremendous tantrum-throwers, these ladies proved to be the best travel companion Wheeler could have asked for. "I had more fun writing this book than all my previous books put together," she writes-and it shows. Ambitious and full of life, O My America! is not only a great writer's reckoning with a young country, but also an exuberant tribute to fresh starts, second acts, and six unstoppable women.

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, SpectatorSara 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.'

She also spends months in fourth-floor 1950s apartments, watching television with her hosts, her new friends bent over devices and moaning about Ukraine.At a time of deteriorating relations between Russia and the West, Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news - a Russia of humanity and daily struggles.

In a series of remarkable books - Travels in a Thin Country, Terra Incognita, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry Garrard, Too Close to the Sun and The Magnetic North - Sara Wheeler has shown that she is not only one of the finest travel writers of her generation but a very fine biographer too.

After reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as "Terra Incognita" and "The Magnetic North", the author rediscovered America thirty-five years after her first Greyhound trip across the country.

Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers, the author discovers a complex and ambiguous land belonging both to ancient myth and modern controvery.

The most authorative book available on Chile, now updated with a new 5,000-word introduction.

The author spent six weeks at the pole and on the edge of the infamous Ross Ice Shelf, as well as another month with the British Antarctic Survey. This title presents a meditation on the landscape, myths and history of one of the remotest parts of the globe, as well as an encounter with the people who inhabit this region.

Cherry undertook an epic journey in the Antarctic winter to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin. '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.