British Explorers

The History of Australia: From Indigenous Origins to a Modern Nation Australia is called the “land down under,” but how much do you really know about its past? Did you know that modern Australia started as a British prison colony? Or that for tens of thousands of years before that, Indigenous peoples lived there, building rich cultures and traditions? This book takes you through Australia’s history, from its first inhabitants to the arrival of European settlers to its fight for independence to its current role in world events. Learn about the convicts who built early settlements, the ...

Into Africa: The Extraordinary Journeys of Frederick Courteney Selous – Volumes 1 & 2 Two volumes. One extraordinary life. The complete story of one of Africa's greatest explorers. Before he became a legend, Frederick Courteney Selous was simply a young man determined to explore Africa. In an age when vast regions of the continent remained unknown to Europeans, Selous ventured deep into the African interior with little more than a rifle, a few supplies and an extraordinary appetite for adventure. He crossed raging rivers, travelled through country inhabited by lions, elephants, buffalo, ...

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Larry McMurtry comes the first in a four-volume epic journey through the early American frontier, featuring the Berrybender family, English nobility adrift in the American West in the 1830s. It is 1830, and the Berrybender family—rich, aristocratic, English...

**NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING ROBERT PATTINSON, CHARLIE HUNNAM AND SIENNA MILLER** The story of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the inspiration behind Conan Doyle's The Lost World Fawcett was among the last of a legendary breed of British explorers. For years he explored the Amazon and came to...

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company’s ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo, Leopold II’s vast new African colony. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber...

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university—a history major, no less!—he’s reached middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America. In fact, he’s mislaid more than a...

In 1982, at the age of just 23 and halfway through her architecture studies, Elspeth Beard left her family and friends in London and set off on a 35,000-mile solo adventure around the world on her 1974 BMW R60/6. Reeling from a recent breakup and with only limited savings from her pub job, a tent, a few clothes, and some tools, all packed on the back of her bike, she was determined to prove herself. She had ridden bikes since her teens and was well-traveled. But nothing could prepare her for what lay ahead.

David Livingstone became one of the most famous explorers of the Victorian age, but the man behind the legend was far more complicated than the heroic image preserved in schoolbooks and memorials. Born into a working-class Scottish family, Livingstone rose from the cotton mills of Blantyre to become a doctor, missionary, explorer, abolitionist and international celebrity. His journeys across southern and central Africa transformed European geographical knowledge, drew attention to the horrors of the slave trade and made his name synonymous with Victorian exploration. Yet Livingstone never ...

A novel in The L.A. Quartet. Internationally acclaimed author James Ellroy presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns—it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an...

From the award-winning author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line comes a “splendid” (The New York Times) novel set in nineteenth-century Tibet that follows two outsiders—an Indian schoolteacher spying for the British Empire and an English “lady” explorer—as they venture into a...

The enthralling and often harrowing history of the adventurers who searched for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of nineteenth-century British exploration. After the triumphant end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British took it upon themselves to complete something they had been trying...

Read by the author. Historian and bestselling author of Eleanor, Alice Loxton, presents a scintillating history of Britain, told through portraits of eighteen figures in British history at the age of eighteen. 'The star of her generation' – Dan Snow, host of History Hit 'Utterly, utterly...

International bestselling author Jeffrey Archer returns with a triumphant historical novel, Paths of Glory. Paths of Glory, is the story of such a man—George Mallory. Born in 1886, he was a brilliant student who became part of the Bloomsbury Group at Cambridge in the early twentieth century...

Writer Hadley Freeman investigates her family’s secret history in this “exceptional” (The Washington Post) “masterpiece” (The Daily Telegraph) uncovering a story that spans a century, two World Wars, and three generations. Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother Sara lived in France just...

Into Africa: The Extraordinary Journeys of Frederick Courteney Selous – Volume 2 The young adventurer has become one of Africa's greatest explorers. But Frederick Courteney Selous's most extraordinary journeys still lie ahead. In Volume One of Into Africa, Selous ventured into the African interior as an unknown young hunter, driven by an almost obsessive desire to discover what lay beyond the next river, mountain and distant horizon. Now the world around him is changing. The great elephant country is disappearing. European influence is pushing ever deeper into the interior. Old kingdoms ...

As adventurers from around the world raced to reach the South Pole and achieve other polar firsts in the early 1900s, outsider Ernest Shackleton and his motley expeditions would outshine even the British navy, becoming icons of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Known for prizing loyalty...

Most anyone who has received a basic education in world history knows the story of how "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Most also know that Christopher Columbus made first contact with the Americas while searching for a water route to Asia. However, far fewer people remember that the search for such a route continued for centuries after Columbus' death.

Gertrude Bell crossed deserts, climbed mountains, learned languages, studied ancient ruins, and entered political worlds from which women of her generation were almost entirely excluded. Born into a wealthy industrial family in Victorian England, she could have lived a comfortable and predictable life. Instead, she chose movement. Persia, Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia: each journey took her farther from the expectations of her time and deeper into a region undergoing enormous change. Explorer, archaeologist, writer, photographer, intelligence officer, and political adviser, Bell became one of ...

A novel in The L.A. Quartet. Internationally acclaimed author James Ellroy presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns—it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an...

Contrary to what schools taught, it was the Spanish who first arrived at Canada's West Coast. They found gold near present day Hedley and made off to the coast. The gold was buried present day University of British Columbia, where it has yet to be found. This is the story of how it got there, and the attempts to locate it over the years.