Eland Publishing: 66 books

With her fourteen-year-old daughter Rachel, Dervla Murphy journeyed across the unique island of Madagascar, neither part of Africa, its nearest neighbour, nor part of Asia, the ancestral home the Malagasy people who live there. Beginning at Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, they travelled south...

Laos, caught in the middle of the Vietnam War, is one of the most heavily bombed countries in world history. It’s where Dervla Murphy’s ‘inner-click’ sends her in 1997, when the country had just opened its borders to the West. Her three-month trek is threatened by torn ligaments in her foot,...

Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of her most recent journeys into Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with...

In 1985, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in two of Britian’s most turbulent multiracial communities – the Asian community of Manningham in Bradford and the Caribbean community of Handsworth in Birmingham – with the intention of seeing firsthand the harsh realities of social deprivation. While...

Throughout the 1960s, John Freely explored the alleys, hidden corners and monuments of Istanbul, in between teaching, to create a legendary guidebook with Hilary Sumner-Boyd. But all the passages that were too personal, too capricious, too idiosyncratic, too indulgent of eccentric personalities, too...

Fanny Parkes lived in India between 1822 and 1846 and was the ideal travel writer -courageous, indefatigably curious and determinedly independent. Her journals trace her transformation from prim memsahib to eccentric, sitar-playing Indophile, fluent in Urdu, critical of British rule and passionate...

Flandrau was a rich young American with an individual sense of humour and no prejudices, except against Western uniformity. His travel book, first published in 1908, is more than a ramble among the Mexican people. Based on his brother's coffee plantation, he spent the best part of five years in a...

Greece has always had its admirers, though none seems to have cherished the Athenian tavernas, the murderous traffic and the jaded prostitutes, the petty bureaucratic tyrannies, the street noise and the heroic individualists with the irony and detachment of John Lucas. 92 Acharnon Street is a gritty...

In The Japanese Chronicles, Swiss travel writer and photographer Nicolas Bouvier shares his intimate experience of Japan. Based on three decades of travel throughout the islands, his reports, recollections, and reflections take the reader beyond the commonplace and into an unexpected landscape. Whether...

Nigel Barley travels to Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork ‘somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly,...

Nigel Barley returns to Cameroon on hearing that the elaborate and fearsome Dowayo circumcision ceremony, performed at six or seven year intervals, is about to take place. Yet, like much else in this hilarious book by the author of The Innocent Anthropologist, the circumcision ceremony proves frustratingly...

Over a period of eighteen months in the early 1980s, Tony Parker interviewed the residents of a housing estate in South London. He succeeded in getting a wide assortment of personalities to talk freely -a vagrant, two policemen, an oft-convicted fence and mother of five, a pro-flogging magistrate,...

George Paloczi-Horvath was born in 1908 into the feudal nobility of Hungary. Despite his privileged background, he came to realize that his family's wealth was based on the exploitation of a brutalized peasantry. By the 1930s he was an active anti-Nazi; in 1941 he was forced to flee the country. Returning...

Through the prism of the experiences of five British governesses working in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, Harvey Pitcher paints a rich and intimate portrait of pre Revolutionary Russian society and finds himself with a unique eyewitness perspective on the Russian Revolution and...