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Stranded at Schiphol airport, Ben Coates called up a friendly Dutch girl he'd met some months earlier. He stayed for dinner. Actually, he stayed for good. In the first audiobook to consider the hidden heart and history of the Netherlands from a modern perspective, the author explores the length and breadth of his adopted homeland and discovers why one of the world's smallest countries is also so significant and so fascinating.

For five years, Ben Coates lived alongside a major channel of the river in Rotterdam, crossing it daily, swimming and sailing in its tributaries. In The Rhine, he sets out by bicycle from the Netherlands where it enters the North Sea, following it through Germany, France and Liechtenstein, to its source in the icy Alps. He explores the impact that the Rhine has had on European culture and history and finds out how influences have flowed along and across the river, shaping the people who live alongside it.

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.

In My Scotland, number one best-selling author Val McDermid takes readers to the landscapes she has known all her life and the places where her stories and characters reside. This remarkable book uncovers Val's own Scotland in all its glory - from the iconic Isle of Skye to the majestic streets of Edinburgh, from the undiscovered hideaways of the Highlands to the wild and untamed Jura. Featuring excerpts from Val McDermid's best-selling novels and charting Karen Pirie's Fife to Lindsay Gordon's Glasgow, My Scotland is an unforgettable and uniquely personal journey.

The relationship between man and horse on the Eurasian steppe gave rise to a succession of rich nomadic cultures. Among them were the Mongols of the 13th century - a small tribe, which, under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, created the largest contiguous land empire in history. Inspired by the extraordinary life nomads still lead today, Tim Cope embarked on a journey that hadn’t been successfully completed since those times: to travel on horseback across the entire length of the Eurasian steppe.

Robert Twigger, poet and travel author, was in search of a new way up England when he stumbled across the Great North Line. From Christchurch on the South Coast to Old Sarum to Stonehenge, to Avebury, to Notgrove barrow, to Meon Hill in the midlands, to Thor's Cave, to Arbor Low stone circle, to Mam Tor, to Ilkley in Yorkshire and its three stone circles and the Swastika Stone, to several forts and camps in Northumberland to Lindisfarne (plus about thirty more sites en route). A single dead-straight line following one degree 50 West up Britain.

A bulwark against invasion, a conduit for exchange and a challenge to be conquered, the English Channel has always been many things to many people. Today it's the busiest shipping lane in the world and hosts more than 30 million passenger crossings every year but this sliver of choppy brine, just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, represents much more than a conductor of goods and people.

Best-selling author of Italian Ways Tim Parks follows the hair-raising journey of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, 250 miles on foot from Rome to Ravenna, to look at Italy past and present.

From the Paleozoic volcanoes that stained its soil, to the Saxons who occupied it, to the Tudors who traded its wool, to the Land Girls of wartime, John Lewis-Stempel charts a sweeping, lyrical history of Woodston: the quintessential English farm. With his combined skills of farmer and historian, Lewis-Stempel digs deep into written records, the memories of relatives and the landscape itself to celebrate the farmland his family have been bound to for millennia.

This celebration of the English countryside does not only focus on the rolling green landscapes and magnificent monuments that set England apart from the rest of the world. Many of the contributors bring their own special touch, presenting a refreshingly eclectic variety of personal icons, from pub signs to seaside piers, from cattle grids to canal boats, and from village cricket to nimbies.

Roger Deakin set out in 1996 to swim through the British Isles. The result a uniquely personal view of an island race and a people with a deep affinity for water. From the sea, from rock pools, from rivers and streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools and spas, from fens, dykes, moats, aqueducts, waterfalls, flooded quarries, even canals, Deakin gains a fascinating perspective on modern Britain.

Although mostly unseen by us, moths are everywhere. And their capacity to delight astounds. Inspired by a revelatory encounter with a Poplar Hawk-moth - a huge, velvety-winged wonder wrapped in silver - James Lowen embarks on a year-long quest to celebrate the joy of Britain’s rarest and most remarkable moths. By hiking up mountains, wading through marshes and roaming by night amid ancient woodlands, James follows the trails of both Victorian collectors and present-day conservationists.

In 1951, the Festival of Britain commissioned a series of short guides they dubbed ‘handbooks for the explorer’. Their aim was to encourage readers to venture out beyond the capital and on to ‘the roads and the by-roads’ to see Britain as a ‘living country’. Yet these 13 guides did more than celebrate the rural splendour of this ‘island nation’: they also made much of Britain’s industrial power and mid-century ambition. Armed with these About Britain guides, historian Tim Cole takes to the roads to find out what has changed and what has remained the same.

Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of Britain's best graveyards. Who are London's outcast dead and why is David Bowie their guardian angel? How did a thousand skulls come to be stacked beneath a church in Kent? Why is the music hall star who sang "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" buried on a hillside in Glasgow far from the sound of the silvery sea?

Sean Mallen was ecstatic when he unexpectedly got the chance he’d always craved: to be a London-based foreign correspondent. Except: his tearful wife and six-year-old daughter hated the idea of uprooting their lives and moving to another country. Falling for London is the hilarious and touching story of how he convinced them to go, how they learned to live in and love that wondrous but challenging city, and how his dream came true in ways he could have never expected.

After coming terrifyingly close to suicide, Jake Tyler was determined to take back control of his life from the clutches of depression. With only a pair of walking boots and a backpack, he left his home town of Maldon and began a 3,000-mile walk around the British mainland. In documenting every step of his adventure, Jake shares the ways in which his road to recovery was enhanced by the kindness of strangers, who helped him to better understand himself and the power of human connection.

The best-selling puzzle phenomenon is back with a whole new twist on the treasure hunt. Based on 40 brand new maps stretching across the whole of Britain, The Ordnance Survey Great British Treasure Hunt will offer hours of brain-teasing fun. From the highlands of Scotland, to the White Cliffs of Dover and taking in iconic locations like Loch Ness, Glastonbury Tor, Stratford-Upon-Avon and the cloisters of Cambridge, you'll have to piece together the clues, scour the maps and crack codes and anagrams on the trail of a mysterious treasure.

What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France.

In this moving, tender memoir of losing a beloved spouse, the longtime editor of Texas Monthly, newly widowed, returns alone to a city whose enchantment he's only ever shared with his wife, in search of solace, memories, and the courage to find a way forward.

Iceland is home to only 330,000 people but more than 265 museums and public collections, ranging from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: how to display what can't be seen?