Books published by Eland Publishing Ltd

A title, in which, the millennia of mercantile and cultural exchange along the Silk Route are celebrated by travellers and writers from Marco Polo to Sven Hedin, from William of Rubrick to Ella Maillart

Set primarily on a plantation called Arcadia, overlooking the sea and a distant Cuba from on high, the author alternates between the acceptable pursuits of a Victorian gentlewoman - sewing, social visits, riding - and trying to find a more meaningful role for herself in this man's world.

Recounts the first half of the author's adventurous life with dry, infectious, laconic wit, observing the transformation of a stammering schoolboy into a worldly wise multilingual intelligence agent on the point of becoming a formidable travel writer.

Doreen Ingrams and her husband were the first Europeans ever to live in the Hadhramaut, an extraordinary, isolated region of southern Arabia. Married to an Arabic-speaking British official, she arrived by boat, and during their ten-year residency travelled throughout the region by camel and donkey. This book tells her story.

Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enjoyment of family life. In this title, the author develops an acute eye for the way in which isolation has shaped this society.

Over a period of eighteen months Tony Parker interviewed the residents of an ordinary housing estate in South London. He listened to an assorted mixture of personalities - including a vagrant, two policemen, an often-convicted fence who was the mother of five children, a pro-flogging magistrate, a local doctor, and a 75-year-old widower who spent "an hour or two in bed each week with one or other of about twelve different ladies I meet at our church". The inhabitants of "Providence" opened their hearts, revealing all their quirks, emotions and prejudices. These interviews prove that extraordinary stories are found not only in deserts and jungles: even amid the bleak sprawl of South London, Tony Parker discovered a community that is diverse and enthralling.

Martha was the youngest of sixteen, handpicked reporters who filed accurate, confidential reports on the human stories behind the statistics of the Depression directly to Roosevelt's White House.

From his birth in 1916 (in the carding room of a cotton mill) until he ran away to London, William Woodruff lived in the heart of Blackburn's weaving community. But after Lancashire's supremacy in cotton textiles had ended with the crash of 1920, his father was thrown out of work. From then on, including the great depression of the 1930s, Woodruff and his family faced a life blighted by extreme poverty. Reading this book today, it is hard to comprehend that within living memory - and in what was the richest country in the world - so many people couldn't even afford to buy enough food. For the ordinary families of Lancashire, unemployment was an ever-present fear: "If you worked you ate. If there was no work you went hungry."

Describes day-to-day life in the camps where hundreds of children are living in squalor while a handful of dedicated volunteers do their best to feed and care for them, attempting to keep disease at bay with limited resources.

Mother Land is a brilliant debut autobiographical novel with a literary style that recalls such coming-of-age novels as Catcher in the Rye and The Kite Flyer.

Following A Month by the Sea, her acclaimed exploration of life in Gaza, Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of living with and among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in both Israel and Palestine

The author buys an elephant named Tara and rides her over six hundred miles across India to the Sonepur Mela, the world's oldest elephant market. From Bhim, a drink-racked mahout, Shand learned to ride and care for her. From his friend Aditya Patankar he learned Indian ways. And with Tara, his new companion, he fell in love.

In 1966 Dervla Murphy travelled the length and breadth of Ethopia, first on a mule, Jock, whom she named after her publisher, and later on a recalcitrant donkey. The remarkable achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or the thousand-mile trail, but the gradual growth of affection for and understanding of another race.

For travellers through the Aegean from Odysseus onwards, the Greek islands have proved to be places of beauty and enchantment, but also of violence, of love and death. This title groups together poems and prose extracts in order to provide some sense of the delights and tragedies that are part of the history and the present of all Greek islands.

A journey through time: from a scattering of cottages along a pre-roman horse track, to a medieval parish and staging post for travellers, onwards into a prosperous Tudor village favoured by gentlemen for their country seats and an 18th century resort of pleasure gardens eventually transformed by a warren of railway lines.

A work of an Englishman, a desert-loving young officer whose passionate amateur enthusiasm led to the exploration of the Egyptian western desert and the Libyan Sahara on the eve of the second world war.

Winner of the Dolman Best Travel Book Award 2008. A sharply observed and passionate portrait of Greece as Greeks would see it.

In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveler Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first - her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother, whom she nursed until her death. Bicycling fifty miles in a day at the age of eleven, alone, it seems only natural that her first major journey should have been to cycle to India.

For ten hair-raising years, Andrew Graham-Yool was the news editor of the Buenos Aires Herald. All around him friends and aquaintances were 'disappearing'. Although the slightest mistake might have caused his own disappearance, his didn't shrink from getting first-hand experience of this war of terror. He attended clandestine guerrilla conferences, helped relatives trace the missing, and took tea with a torturer who wasn't ashamed to make the most chilling of confessions. "I have never read any book that so conveys what it is like to live in a state of permanent fear."--Graham Greene

In 1782 an enthusiastic young German landed in England. Through the fresh eyes of a foreigner, this title offers insight into what has or hasn't changed over the years. In a series of letters home he describes his amazement at the number of English people who wore spectacles, the amount they drank, and the dreadful food they ate.

Nicolas Bouvier was an image merchant and photographer as well as a writer. This book is accompanied by several of his images of Japan. It is a distillation of his lifelong quest for Japan and his travels.