This is a book about the call of the wild and the response of the spirit to a country that exists perhaps most vividly in the mind. Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica, living with its scientists and dreamers. No book is more true to the spirit of that continent--beguiling, enchanted and vast beyond the furthest reaches of our imagination. Chosen by Beryl Bainbridge and John Major as one of the best books of the year, recommended by the editors of Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, one of the Seattle Times's top ten travel books of the year, Terra Incognita is a classic of polar literature.

Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of effortless elegance and boundless power. In 1910, searching for something new, he arrived in British East Africa and fell in love-with a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was about to change forever. In Nairobi, Finch Hatton met Karen Blixen and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century. Intellectual equals, Finch Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry. Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-game hunter and became an expert bush pilot. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, the open road made flesh.

A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title

More than a decade ago, Sara Wheeler traveled to Antarctica to understand a continent nearly lost to myth and lore. In the widely acclaimed, bestselling Terra Incognita, she chronicled her quest to find a hidden history buried in Antarctica's extreme surroundings. Now, Wheeler journeys to the opposite pole to create a definitive picture of life on the fringes. In The Magnetic North, she takes full measure of the Arctic: at once the most pristine place on earth and the locus of global warming.

Inspired by the spiraling shape of a reindeer-horn bangle, she travels counterclockwise around the North Pole through the territories belonging to Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, marking the transformations of what once seemed an unchangeable landscape. As she witnesses the mounting pollution concentrated at the pole, Wheeler reckons with the illness of the whole organism of the earth.

Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, shadowing the endless Trans-Alaska Pipeline with a tough Idaho-born outdoorswoman, herding reindeer with the Lapps, and visiting the haunting, deceptively peaceful lands of the Gulag, Wheeler brings the Arctic's many contradictions to life. The Magnetic North is an urgent, beautiful book, rich in dramatic description and vivid reporting. It is a singular, deeply personal portrait of a region growing daily in global importance.

'Funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel' Daily Telegraph

'Intrepid and sparky, full of canny quips and lightly poetic observations' Mail on Sunday

'Magnificent and unusual... Glowing Still is a thoughtful and entertaining meditation on identity, geography and the position of the self in the world' Viv Groskop, Spectator

Sara Wheeler is Britain's foremost woman travel writer. Glowing Still is the story of her travelling life - what is 'important, revealing or funny' - in a notoriously testosterone-laden field. Growing up among blue-collar Conservatives in Bristol where 'we didn't know anyone who wasn't like us', Wheeler knew she needed to get away. In her twenties she began a dramatic escape: Pole to Pole, via Poland. Glowing Still recalls happy days on India's Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!); and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl. Corralling reindeer with the Sámi in Arctic Sweden and towing her baby on a sledge, a helpful herdsman advised her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing.

Launching at Nubility, Wheeler voyages, via small children, to the welcoming port of Invisibility (she leaves Immobility for the next volume). As she writes in the introduction, when she set sail 'Role models were scarce in the travel-writing game.' But advancing years usher in unheralded freedoms, and journey's end finds Wheeler at peace among Zanzibar dhows, contemplating our connection with other lives - the irreplaceable value that travel brings - and paying homage to her heroines, among them Martha Gellhorn, the ineffable war correspondent who furnishes Wheeler's epigraph: 'I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.'

Illustrated with both historical images and contemporary snapshots of the people and places that shaped her journey, Mud and Stars gives us timely, witty, and deeply personal insights into Russia, then and now.

One of Smithsonian's Ten Best Travel Books of the Year

'Funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel' Daily Telegraph

'Intrepid and sparky, full of canny quips and lightly poetic observations' Mail on Sunday

'Magnificent and unusual' Viv Groskop, Spectator

Sara Wheeler is Britain's foremost woman travel writer. Glowing Still is the story of her travelling life - what is 'important, revealing or funny' - in a notoriously testosterone-laden field. Growing up among blue-collar Conservatives in Bristol where 'we didn't know anyone who wasn't like us', Wheeler knew she needed to get away. In her twenties she began a dramatic escape: Pole to Pole, via Poland. Glowing Still recalls happy days on India's Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!); and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl. Corralling reindeer with the Sámi in Arctic Sweden and towing her baby on a sledge, a helpful herdsman advised her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing.

Launching at Nubility, Wheeler voyages, via small children, to the welcoming port of Invisibility (she leaves Immobility for the next volume). As she writes in the introduction, when she set sail 'Role models were scarce in the travel-writing game.' But advancing years usher in unheralded freedoms, and journey's end finds Wheeler at peace among Zanzibar dhows, contemplating our connection with other lives - the irreplaceable value that travel brings - and paying homage to her heroines, among them Martha Gellhorn, the ineffable war correspondent who furnishes Wheeler's epigraph: 'I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.'

After serving in the First World War, with zealous encouragement from his neighbor George Bernard Shaw, Cherry wrote the undisputed masterpiece of polar literature, The Worst Journey in the World. But as the years progressed, he faced a terrible struggle against depression and despair. Sara Wheeler's Cherry is the first biography of this great hero of Antarctic exploration, written with unrestricted access to his papers and with the full cooperation of his family.

In O My America!, the travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler embarks on a journey across the United States, guided by the adventures of six women who reinvented themselves as they chased the frontier west.

Wheeler's career has propelled her from pole to pole--camping in Arctic igloos, tracking Indian elephants, contemplating East African swamps so hot that toads explode--but as she stared down the uncharted territory of middle age, she found herself in need of a guide. Fifty is a tough age, she writes. Role models are scarce for women contemplating a second act. Scarce, that is, until she stumbled upon Fanny Trollope.

In 1827, Fanny, mother of Anthony, swapped England for Ohio with hopes of bolstering the family finances. There, failure and disappointment hounded the immigrant for three years before she returned home to write one of the most sensational travel accounts of the nineteenth century. Domestic Manners of the Americans made an instant splash on both sides of the Atlantic, where readers both relished and reviled Trollope's caustic take on the newly independent country. Her legacy became the stuff of legend: Trollopize emerged as a verb meaning to abuse the American nation; Mark Twain judged her the best foreign commentator on his country; the last king of France threw a ball in her honor. Fanny Trollope was forty-nine when she set out for America, and Wheeler, approaching fifty herself, was smitten. Fanny was living proof of life after fertility, and she led Wheeler to other trailblazers: the actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, the radical sociologist Harriet Martineau, the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, the traveler Isabella Bird, and the novelist Catherine Hubback--women born within half a century of one another who all reinvented themselves in a transforming America, the land of new beginnings.

In O My America!, Wheeler tracks her subjects from the Mississippi to the cinder cones of the Mayacamas at the tail end of the Cascades, armed with two sets of maps for each adventure: one current and one the women before her would have used. Bright, spirited, and tremendous tantrum-throwers, these ladies proved to be the best travel companion Wheeler could have asked for. I had more fun writing this book than all my previous books put together, she writes--and it shows. Ambitious and full of life, O My America! is not only a great writer's reckoning with a young country, but also an exuberant tribute to fresh starts, second acts, and six unstoppable women.

Adventures in going forth and staying put from one of our greatest travel writers

In vivid, urgent books such as Terra Incognita and The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler reckoned with the allure and brutality of life on the fringes, exploring distant lands with an extraordinary sensitivity to history, to place, and to the people who inhabit them.
Access All Areas collects the best essays and journalism by a writer who has used extreme travel as a means to explore an inner landscape. Ranging from Albania to the Arctic, Wheeler attends a religion seminar aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 and defrosts her underwear inside an igloo. She treks to distant Tierra del Fuego--a place where nothing ever happened--and to the swamps of Malawi, a place so hot that toads explode. She crosses dubious borders with nothing but a kidney donor card for ID and learns to wing walk and belly dance, though not at the same time.
Charming, scathing, restless, and eternally amused, the writer we meet in Access All Areas has spent a lifetime investigating roots and rootlessness. Seeking only to satisfy her own curiosity, Wheeler shows us the world.