Adventure
A marriage of inconvenience: The Bride Stone, by Sally Gardner, reviewed
His capricious father’s will leaves a young English doctor needing to find a wife within two days and seven hours of his return home from revolutionary France
Four months adrift in the Pacific: a couple’s extraordinary feat of endurance
When a freak occurrence wrecked the Baileys’ sloop 300 miles from the Galapagos, their chances of rescue were minimal – and one of them couldn’t even swim
A born storyteller
Instead of swashbuckling, we get the Parisian art world, trout-fishing, unhappy couples and surrogate parenting – though the 20 stories for children are full of adventure
Man of many parts
William Boyd taps into the classical novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man’s century-spanning life, even to the…
The burden of freedom: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan, reviewed
It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations…
Learning the secrets of happiness from Britain’s most foul-mouthed angler
To go fishing on the Itchen in mayfly season, you either have to be very, very rich or very, very…
Northern lights
‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’…
These I have loved
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
Norwegian wood
Kon-Tiki is a dramatisation of Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,300-mile, 101-day journey across the Pacific by balsa-wood raft, which took place in…
Derring dos and don’ts
Recent years have seen the slim but splendid Patrick Leigh Fermor oeuvre swell considerably. In 2008 came In Tearing Haste,…
A choice of children’s books
A children’s author and illustrator, Jonathan Emmet, created a stir recently by saying that women are effectively gatekeepers of children’s…
A Fisherman’s Notebook
You remember the climax of Jaws — the primeval moment when Quint the crazed Ahab-like fisherman goes mano a mano…
