Showing titles in Adventurers, Explorers & Survival

When Bobby’s eleven-year relationship broke down, he thought he'd hit rock bottom. Then a bad economic turn and a handful of unlucky business deals drove his hard-earned company into the ground, and Bobby discovered what it was to lose all his purpose in life. Drowning his sorrows in a pub with his sister one day, Bobby boldly declared that he would turn his life around by driving from his hometown of Wigan all the way to Australia. The next day, Bobby’s plan kicked in – he sold up his business and spent all the money revamping a truck that he would drive and live in with his dog, Red.

For 46 years, Carol Minto has quietly gone about her life, carrying with her the most extraordinary and heartbreaking secrets. In The Asylum, Carol tells the full story of how she overcame unimaginable suffering, to find the happiness and solace she has today as a mother and grandmother.

After a life-changing neck injury left him paralyzed, Ed Jackson defied the odds to walk again. Driven by a renewed perspective on life and determination to push his limits, Ed set out to climb Himlung Himal—a 7,126-meter peak deep in Nepal's Himalayas. Stranded on the side of the mountain with no shelter, minimal food and water, and fading hope, the team endured a harrowing night, unsure if rescue would ever come.

His career as a naturalist and broadcaster has spanned nearly five decades and there are very few places on the globe that he has not visited. In this volume of memoirs David tells stories of the people and animals he has met and the places that he has visited. Over the last 25 years he has established himself as the world's leading Natural History programme maker with several landmark BBC series.

Noraly Schoenmaker was a thirty-something geologist living in the Netherlands when she learned that her live-in partner had been having a long-term affair. Suddenly without a place to stay, she decided to quit her job and jet off to India in search of a new beginning. Her plans were dashed when she fell quickly and helplessly in love: with a motorcycle. Behind the handlebars, she felt alive and free – nimble enough to trace the narrowest paths, powerful enough to travel the longest of roads. She first rode toward the Pacific, through the jungles of Myanmar and Thailand, then into Malaysia.

World-renowned adventurer and broadcaster, Bear Grylls, presents some of the most incredible near-death experiences, told by those who lived to tell the tale. These extraordinary and diverse accounts of human bravery, mental and physical strength - and sometimes sheer luck - range from being stranded for more than 50 days at sea, to surviving world-changing acts of terrorism.

You'll be awe-inspired by the heroic efforts of the crew of the Endurance, a ship that battled its way for six weeks through thousands of miles of pack ice while ironically only a day's sail from its destination.

In Pole to Pole we join Michael Palin on the second of his epic challenges. Travelling from the North Pole to the South Pole, he experiences every extreme the globe has to offer. As he crosses 16 countries by train, truck, raft, Ski-Doo, barge, balloon and bicycle, he meets a diverse range of fascinating characters and landscapes while his own endurance is tested to the limit. With his customary aplomb, he plunges himself into the local cultures, starring in a crayfish documentary in Novgorod, attending a baby-rolling ceremony at a Cypriot wedding, and consulting an Mpulugu witch-doctor.

TV documentary maker Simon Reeve has dodged bullets on frontlines, hunted with the Bushmen of the Kalahari, dived with manta rays, seals and sharks, survived malaria, walked through minefields, tracked lions on foot, been taught to fish by the President of Moldova, and detained for spying by the KGB.

The third and most ambitious of Michael Palin's adventures is a voyage of epic proportions - the circumnavigation of the Pacific Rim. He travels for almost a year through the 18 countries that border the world's largest ocean, and is forced to negotiate mountains, plunging gorges, cross glaciers and dodge icebergs. Volcanoes also mark Palin's journey. He climbs one which has freshly erupted and follows great rivers like the Yangtze and the Amazon to some of the most remote places on earth.

Danny Baker is a national treasure with a well-documented and colourful life. For over a quarter of a century, he has amused and entertained audiences on both radio and television. Beginning his career at the age of 15 in a small record shop in London's West End, Danny went on to become an acclaimed music journalist and started his radio career on BBC GLR in 1989. With a unique take on life and a lot to say, Danny's latest book is full of his trademark warmth, wit and insight.

For years living was a fate worse than death for Dan Biddle. In a moment of someone else’s madness, he lost all meaning to his existence along with both his legs, his left eye, his spleen and all hearing in his left ear. His body and mind were devastated on 7 July 2005, during the worst single terrorist atrocity on British soil. It took ten seconds to disassemble him. It’s taken twenty years for him to find the inner peace and brutal honesty reveal his daily battle to go on surviving.

74-year-old Derbyshire man Ken Smith has spent the past four decades in the Scottish Highlands, living alone in a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as 'the lonely loch'. He has no electricity or running water. He lives off the land, fishing for his supper, chopping wood, and even brewing his own tipple. For the first time, Ken shares the story of his life.

A victim of her mother’s Munchausen by proxy and child abuse survivor, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s unique and controversial case made headlines across the world. Now, she’s finally free to start living her life on her terms—and to tell her own story as only she can.

Michael Palin journeys to a vast country of unimaginable contrasts - Brazil. An economic powerhouse, it is host to a staggering variety of peoples. He starts his journey in the north, in the remote mountains and forests on the border with Venezuela, and finishes in the south at the legendary Iguaçu Falls. He travels by river-boat, float-plane and foot to visit tribes deep in the jungle, samples life in the agricultural and mining heartland of Brazil, experiences the modernism of Brasília and the heady mix of Rio de Janeiro, and ventures into the favelas.

In March 2020, Kate Garraway's husband, Derek Draper, contracted COVID-19 and was placed in a medically induced coma. Initially, Kate was told that he would not survive. Still in hospital and in a critical condition, he is thought to be the UK's longest-fighting COVID-19 patient. In this intimate book, Kate shares her deeply personal story.

Journeys to Impossible Places continues the story Simon started in his phenomenal Sunday Times best seller Step by Step, which traced the first decades of his life from depressed and unemployed teenager through to his early TV programmes. Now Simon takes us on the epic and thrilling adventures that followed, in beautiful, tricky and downright dangerous corners of the world, as he travelled through the Tropics, to remote paradise islands, jungles dripping with heat and life and on nerve-wracking secret missions.

Joanne Phillips’ ordeal began aged 13 when she was gang-raped in her bedroom by local boys. Following the trauma, she dropped out of school, was befriended by an older man and was forced into prostitution aged 16. Over the next six years, she was raped by over 500 men, starved, beaten, and transported around the country to brothels. Forced to have sex with men from all walks of life including lawyers, stockbrokers, doctors, a parish councillor, Joanne was even made to have sex with her former school headteacher—who didn’t recognise her.

In April 2018, seasoned adventurer Ben Fogle and Olympic cycling gold medallist Victoria Pendleton, along with mountaineer Kenton Cool, took on their most exhausting challenge yet – climbing Everest for the British Red Cross to highlight the environmental challenges mountains face. It would be harrowing and exhilarating in equal measure as they walked the fine line between life and death 8,000 metres above sea level.

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world. Lansing describes how the men survived a 1,000-mile voyage in an open boat across the stormiest ocean on the globe and an overland trek through forbidding glaciers and mountains.