Glowing still

Wheeler, Sara

£22.00

Britain’s foremost woman travel writer Sara Wheeler records her life of adventure, from the Antarctic to Zanzibar. 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.

Out of stock

Publish Date: 16/03/2023
ISBN: 9781408716731 Category: Tag:

Description

Britain’s foremost woman travel writer Sara Wheeler records her life of adventure, from the Antarctic to Zanzibar.

‘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.’

Additional information

Weight 600 g
Dimensions 234 × 158 × 36 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Hardback

Pages

351

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

910.4092 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K