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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 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.

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.

Hollywood producer Hopwood DePree had been told as a boy that an ancestor—who he was named for—had left his family’s English castle in the 1700s to come to America. One night after some wine and a visit to Ancestry.com, Hopwood discovered a photograph of a magnificent English estate with a familiar name: Hopwood Hall, a 60-room, 600-year-old grand manor on 5,000 acres. And with that, Hopwood DePree’s life took an almost fairytale turn.

Notes from a Summer Cottage by Nina Burton is a beautifully written nature memoir about the time spent renovating a cottage in the Swedish countryside and all the species that she encountered her during her stay. Within the walls, the ceiling and the floor of the cottage and its surrounding garden, she encounters a host of animals—ants, honey bees, foxes, squirrels, blackbirds, badgers, pigeons, deer and many more—all of whom have made her house and garden their home and all of whom cause Nina to reflect on their role within our world.

Switzerland is a tourist country full of magnificent wonders with an amazing array of landscapes extending from the vast mountains to the rolling valleys. It is a country blessed with many authentic villages, modern ski resorts, old towns, and urban cities. Let this audiobook guide you to the many places you must see in Switzerland to make your visit a life-changing experience.

When Steve Sieberson and his wife unexpectedly found themselves in Britain with an entire summer on their hands, they readily agreed to avoid the usual tourist attractions, opting instead for a road trip to the UK’s far-flung national parks. As they set out, however, he envisioned bracing days of energetic hill-walking, while she assumed they would relax in tearooms and cozy pubs.