Eland Publishing: 66 books

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first...

Seen through the eyes of a young boy, the Argentine pampas was a land of freedom and endless exploration. In scintillating detail Hudson recalls its wild artichoke thistles, temporary lakes, spectacular storms, unforgettable trees and its pulsating bird life. He also captures the idiocyncracies of...

Inspired by childhood stories of Prester John and the Queen of Sheba, in 1966 Dervla Murphy bought Jock, an amiable pack-mule, and set off to trek across the highlands of this awesome but troubled land. She wandered south from the Red Sea shore to Sheba's Aksum and up onto the icy roof of Africa,...

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to...

On an unamed Island that can only be Ceylon, the traveller checks into his 117th rented room, abandoned by his lover, poor and feverish. A book on Indian insects deepens his morbid fascination with the crawling inhabitants of the room-'a pretty world of killers'- barely distinguishable from the insect...

As Dervla Murphy crisscrossed the Balkans in a series of bicycle journeys towards the beginning and end of the 1990s, she recorded the griefs and confusions of the ordinary people, many of whom had showed extraordinary courage and resilience during that terrible ‘decade of decay’ and whose voices...

In 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi, the last Prince of the Sicilian Lampedusa family, died impoverished and unknown, leaving behind the manuscript of a book he had recently finished. The following year the book, The Leopard, was published in Italy and has since been widely translated and recognized as one of...

After her epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle in 1963, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in the life of the sub-continent, working for six months in an orphanage for Tibetan children in Northern India. She fell in love with the 'Tiblets' - the cheerful, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate...

Dervla Murphy and her five-year-old daughter Rachel- with little money, no taste for luxury and few concrete plans- meander slowly from Bombay to the southernmost tip of India. Interested in everything they see but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, travelling...

At the beginning of the Second World War, Koestler was living in the south of France working on Darkness at Noon. After retreating to Paris he was imprisoned by the French as an undesirable alien even though he had been a respected crusader against fascism. Only luck and his passionate energy allowed...

Until 1912 Morocco had never suffered foreign domination, and its mountainous interior was as closed to foreigners as Tibet. Walter Harris was the exception. He lived in the country for more than thirty-five years, and as The Times correspondant he observed every aspect of its life. He describes the...

These four interlinked stories encapsulate Martha Gellhorn's firsthand observation of the Great Depression. Fiction crafted with documentary accuracy, they vividly render the gradual spiritual collapse of the simple, homely sufficiency of American life in the face of sudden unemployment, desperate...

In 1924, the irrepressibly curious Alberto Denti arrived in Libya to work in Italy’s African colonies. With a natural ear for a story and a passionate interest in his work, he must have been as good a doctor as he was a writer. Though equally at home in an embassy or a brothel, Denti appears to...

Gavin Maxwell was a romantic, self-destructive, aristocratic adventurer who worked as secret agent, shark fisherman, racing driver, poet and travel writer. His books on Iraq, Sicily and Morocco were acclaimed, but his fame as a writer rested on his bestselling story of the otters he raised and lived...