Travel Garden

Never believe that life in a tiny Spanish mountain village is predictable. Vicky and Joe have finished fixing up their house and look forward to peaceful days enjoying their retirement. Then the fish van arrives and, instead of delivering fresh fish, disgorges the Ufarte family. The peace of El Hoyo is shattered. Packed with badly behaved humans and animals, irreverent humour and sunshine, this audiobook will make you laugh out loud.

"I dreamed I was an old woman, but not too old, living in Ireland. I went for morning walks, sipped tea with the locals in the afternoons, and sat before a cheerful fire on cool evenings..."Find inspiration and laughter in this American’s journey to and through the Emerald Isle. See the sights, meet the characters, and experience some of the adventures and often funny discoveries and adjustments that come with being “that American woman” living in Ireland. In 2013, Ms. Fadely, one-eighth Irish but one hundred percent American, moved from California to the country she fell in love with...

An improbable world beckons. We think we know Madagascar, but it's too big, too eccentric and too impenetrable to be truly understood. If it was stretched out across Europe, the islands would reach from London to Algiers, and yet its road network is barely bigger than tiny Jamaica's. There is no evidence of any human life until about 10,000 years ago, and, when eventually people settled, it was migrants from Borneo - 3,700 miles away - who came out on top.

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake.

At the age of 19, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to "the world's longest, toughest horse race" - an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of 25 wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, and many fail to finish. Rough Magic captures the extraordinary story of one young woman who forged ahead, against all odds, to become the first female winner of this breathtaking race.

American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavors. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories? A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narratives from every corner of the country. 

So you want to play with magic? There’s trouble in the French Quarter when a professional basketball player hires Wyatt and voodoo mambo Mama Mulate to help him exorcise a supernatural demon. Wyatt is thrilled to have a paying client, Mama, over the moon in lust for the handsome athlete. Things look rosy for the pair of paranormal investigators until the assignment dictates Wyatt travel back in time to antebellum New Orleans. Thrust headfirst into the middle of a dangerous situation, Wyatt must deal with a red-haired Irish witch named Aisling and avoid becoming a haunted torture room ...

Patrick E. McGovern takes us on a fascinating journey through time to the dawn of brewing, when our ancestors might well have made a paleo brew of wild fruits, honey, cereals, and botanicals. Early beverage makers must have marveled at the magical process of fermentation. Their amazement grew as they drank the mind-altering drinks, which were to become the medicines, religious symbols, and social lubricants of later cultures.

As the bustle of the winter holidays in the Little Shop of Found Things gives way to spring, Xanthe is left to reflect on the strange events of the past year. While she's tried to keep her time-traveling talents a secret from those close to her, she is forced to take responsibility for having inadvertently transported the dangerous Benedict Fairfax to her own time. Xanthe comes to see that she must use her skills as a spinner if she and Flora are ever to be safe and turns to the Spinners book for help.

Hot dogs. Poor people created them. Rich people found a way to charge fifteen dollars for them. They’re high culture, they’re low culture, they’re sports food, they’re kids' food, they’re hangover food, and they’re deeply American, despite having no basis whatsoever in America's Indigenous traditions. You can love them, you can hate them, but you can’t avoid the great American hot dog. Raw Dog is part investigation into the cultural and culinary significance of hot dogs and part travelogue documenting a cross-country road trip researching them as they’re served today.

Two hundred years ago China's imperial rulers sensed a threat to a past-oriented society in the dynamism of the West and tried to frustrate foreign entry.

After years of hard work, Matthew and Alex Graham have created a thriving home in the Colony of Maryland. About time, in Alex's opinion, after far too many adventures she is really looking forward to some well-deserved peace and quiet. A futile hope, as it turns out. Things start to heat up when Jacob, the third Graham son, absconds from his apprenticeship to see the world - especially as Jacob leaves behind a girl whom he has wed in a most irregular fashion. Then there's the infected matter of the fellow time traveler Alex feels obliged to help - no matter the risk.

When best-selling mystery writer David Rosenfelt and his family moved from Southern California to Maine, he thought he had prepared for everything. They had mapped the route, brought three GPSs for backup, as well as refrigerators full of food, and stoves and microwaves on which to cook them. But traveling with 25 dogs turned out to be a bigger ordeal than he anticipated, despite RVs, the extra kibble, volunteers (including a few readers), and camping equipment.

Discover the heartwarming true story of a life-changing friendship between a man and his rescue cat, Nala, as they adventure together on a bike journey around the world - from the Instagram phenomenon @1bike1world. When 30-year-old Dean Nicholson set off from Scotland to cycle around the world, his aim was to learn as much as he could about our troubled planet. But he hadn't bargained on the lessons he'd learn from his unlikely companion.

The first novel of Kage Baker’s critically acclaimed, much-loved series, the Company, introduces us to a world where the future of commerce is the past. In the 24th century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr. Zeus, Inc. One of these is Mendoza, the botanist. She is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden.

The year is 1925. It is sixty degrees below zero. The wind sweeps tons of snow over the deep-frozen Alaskan landscape. The nearest railhead is seven hundred miles away. Airplanes cannot fly. The way to Nome is blocked by a treacherous frozen sound, an icebound port, and mountains to the west. But there is a diphtheria epidemic in Nome. The children need serum from the outside world if they are to survive. Their only hope is a few chosen Eskimo drivers and their teams of dogs.

Steven Spurrier is one of the wine trade’s most important figures. Over the years, he took the role of wine merchant, buyer, wine educator, and lecturer; he wrote books, wine courses, and over 300 columns for Decanter magazine. He set up the breakthrough "Judgement of Paris" in 1976—a tasting in which outsider wines from California were pitched blind against Bordeaux’ finest, and won—which still sends reverberations through the wine trade today.

An immersive journey through the culture and cuisine of one Japanese town, its forest, and its watershed - where ducks are hunted by net, saké is brewed from the purest mountain water, and charcoal is fired in stone kilns - by an American writer and food stylist who spent years working alongside artisans.

After watching a documentary about a fifty-year-old unsolved crime, an otherwise ordinary guy finds himself both blessed and burdened by the ability to travel through time and space, but not in the physical sense, and only as it may relate to that unsolved crime. Braving the debilitating physical effects of his space time continuum journeys, he faces 1970s Mob bosses and their cronies, and murder and deceit, from both sides of the law.

Stephen Kuusisto was born legally blind - but he was also raised in the 1950s and taught to deny his blindness in order to "pass" as sighted. Stephen attended public school, rode a bike, and read books pressed right up against his nose. As an adult, he coped with his limited vision by becoming a professor in a small college town, memorizing routes for all of the places he needed to be. Then, at the age of 38, he was laid off. With no other job opportunities in his vicinity, he would have to travel to find work.