– Journeys from the edge
North Africa and beyond – A collection of first and second hand (book reviews) stories.
Rosemary Mahoney was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1961. She holds dual nationality for the USA and Ireland. Her travel books have included The Singular Pilgrim – Travels on Sacred Ground and Down the Nile – Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff . She has contributed to a wide range of magazines and newspapers on both…
Adrian Hartley was born in 1965 in Nairobi. In the 1990s he was a war correspondent for Reuters, covering African conflicts. His memoir, The Zanzibar Chest, takes him from the Indian Ocean’s African coast to the Middle East, and Yemen in particular, in search of answers to questions about family history. His journey reads as…
Beryl Markham was born in Rutland, England in 1902. She grew up in Kenya. Her memoir West with the Night is a vivid account of her African experiences as a race course trainer and bush pilot. In 1936 she became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, from England to North America. Beryl…
Antoine de Saint-Exupery was born in Lyon, France in 1900. As well as being a writer, journalist and poet, he was also an aviator. His writings include travel adventure stories about his experiences of flying mail planes across European countries and Africa, and of his courageous flights across the Andes. Desert and mountain ranges are…
Dervla Murphy was from Waterford, in the Republic of Ireland. She spent several decades of her life traversing countries and continents, usually with just a bicycle, and often with her daughter, who was aged from four to early adulthood. I admire her prose for conveying situations like they really were, but frequently with a dead…
(Content or language may offend) EXTRACT: ……. There is nothing remotely impressionistic though, about the following anecdote from the environs of Meknes – it is a short story in itself. The details remain as clear to me as the day they happened, buried permanently in my psyche. I remember my Meknes hotel room, with its…
(Morocco Travel Writing, ⛔️ ✋ Content or language may offend) Seville Nights It is a November evening in 1990 and I am stood in an oak panelled bar in Seville’s Barrio Santa Cruz neighbourhood. The mahogany bar counter is covered in white chalk marks, each dash representing a beer consumed by the patron stood in…