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If you still have doubts about the relevance of travel writing in the twenty-first century, this book will satisfy them’ Sunday Times   `Every page of her new book carries the imprint of her originality of thought and expression’ New Statesman   `A rather magnificent family journey’ Times Literary Supplement    `Rich . . . expert . . . beautiful’ Evening Standard    `Humane and scholarly . . . wonderful’ Independent   `My book of the year’ The Times","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49536527991057,"sku":"GOR001295131","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49930283122961,"sku":"GOR001762657","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51822130233617,"sku":"CIN0330372815VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52103646675217,"sku":"CIN0330372815G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52877664551185,"sku":"GOR011959978","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53135346598161,"sku":"GOR001000469","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330372815.jpg?v=1751196514"},{"product_id":"strangerland-book-helena-drysdale-9780330411707","title":"Strangerland","description":"In 1834, Isabella Campbell left England for India, and within two weeks of joining her brother had married his best friend, a dashing cavalry officer named Charles Gascoyne.   Twenty years – and nine children – later, Charles decreed the family should leave India for a nascent British colony on the other side of the world: New Zealand. He went ahead with the children and their governess; Isabella, who was unwell, returned to England. On landing in New Zealand a year later, she found herself ousted by the governess, and rejected by her children and her once-beloved husband. While battle clouds massed over the Gascoyne family, so New Zealand disintegrated into war between British settlers and the Maori. Bloodshed came close when Isabella’s son Fred was embroiled in a massacre by a notorious Maori warrior-prophet. When the Gascoynes were joined by their nephew Bamber, more terror lay in store.   A hundred and fifty years on, Helena Drysdale has woven together the facts and fabric of her cousins’ lives to create an engrossing, intimate map of one family’s journey, vividly illuminating the story of their times.   `A powerful piece of family history . . . and a spellbinding account of the Gascoyne family’s decline and fall’ Miranda Seymour,  Sunday Times   `Helena Drysdale has researched her subject impeccably, giving us an absolutely vivid reconstruction of the intimate fabric of Isabella’s life, and her descriptions, from the heat and dust of the Gascoynes’ early life in India to the scarcely believable hardships of the pioneer’s lot, are among the best I have ever read’ Katie Hickman,  Daily Mail    `Why did everyone turn against Isabella? The mystery, like life itself, adds to the sense of reality in this wonderful book’ P. J. Kavanagh,  Spectator","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49539894771985,"sku":"GOR001526362","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330411705.jpg?v=1751102484"},{"product_id":"strangerland-book-helena-drysdale-9780330411691","title":"Strangerland","description":"In 1834, when Isabella Campbell was twenty-four, she left England for India, where she met the man that would become her husband: Charles Gascoyne. Life settled into a routine, but there was upheaval ahead, on a scale no-one could have expected: after twenty-six years in India, Charles decided the family would leave for New Zealand; Isabella, who was unwell, would return to England, and rejoin her husband and children later. In fact, it would be over a year before Isabella was reunited with her family -- or not, as it turned out. Arriving in New Zealand, Isabella discovered the children's governess had become her husband's lover; Charles blamed Isabella for the failure of their marriage -- a marriage she had not even realized was under threat. It was not just Isabella who found herself in crisis, however: the country itself was in turmoil, as British settlers warred with native Maoris. For Isabella, events came to a head -- and the public became personal -- when some of her own relatives were slaughtered.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49542709018897,"sku":"GOR006488731","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49585621303569,"sku":"GOR004539088","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50408821588241,"sku":"GOR006390810","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330411691.jpg?v=1751450572"},{"product_id":"dancing-with-the-dead-book-helena-drysdale-9780241129548","title":"Dancing with the Dead","description":"Helena Drysdale was leaving for Madagascar when family papers revealed that her ancestors traded there during the 19th century. There were hints of piracy and slave trading. Madagascar was not their only haunt. There was also Zanzibar with its plump sultans and the Comoro Islands. Helena and her photographer husband, Richard Pomery, set off to follow in their wake and find any lingering family connections. Their four-month journey takes them from old colonial Mombasa to the labyrinthine alleys of Zanzibar, from Moslem ceremonies of \"second marriage\" in the Comoro Islands to ancestor-worship in Madagascar and annual exhumations of the dead. They are travellers in a traveller's world: everyone comes by sea from somewhere else; everyone shares ancestral dreams of leaving and arriving. The story is an exploration not only of the wilder parts of these Indian Ocean Islands, of their culture and history, but also of our relationship with our ancestors.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49558670508305,"sku":"GOR001379699","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52625126752529,"sku":"GOR011372235","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0241129540.jpg?v=1750780462"},{"product_id":"looking-for-george-book-helena-drysdale-9780330347921","title":"Looking for George","description":"Travelling with friends through Romania in 1979, Helena Drysdale met George Cupar, an Orthodox priest-poet. They drank wine in Transylvanian forests and, avoiding the secret police, camped together beneath the Carpathian moon. When she returned home, George wrote her letters full of criticism of the Romanian regime, and asked her to marry him and to help him escape. Abruptly the letters stopped. After the revolution in 1989 Helena Drysdale returned to Romania, a country trapped in a labyrinth of post-Communist paranoia, in search of George. 'This real-life search for a lost face through the cruel and frightened maze of Ceausescu's Romania is a moving, beautifully told, and haunting narrative' Patrick Leigh Fermor 'An intriguing and unusual book, shot through with poignant memories: at once detective story, travelogue, portrait of post-Communist Romania and tribute to a remarkable young man. Helena Drysdale is someone who travels thoughtfully, not just with an open mind but with an active conscience too' Independent on Sunday 'Beautifully written and bristling with dramatic tension, this is one of those rare books that, having started, you really can't put down' Marie Claire","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49566953144593,"sku":"GOR002060369","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49640636186897,"sku":"GOR001913087","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49959452770577,"sku":"CIN0330347926A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50587618935057,"sku":"GOR003886237","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52706996224273,"sku":"GOR009432458","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330347926.jpg?v=1751070944"},{"product_id":"looking-for-gheorghe-book-helena-drysdale-9781856195331","title":"Looking for Gheorghe","description":"After the 1989 revolution, Helena Drysdale travelled to Romania in search of Gheorghe Cupar, an Orthodox priest and poet with whom she had travelled across the country twelve years earlier after they had met in a bar. Together they set out to visit various monasteries, drinking wine in the Transylvanian forests and camping beneath the Carpathian moon, always avoiding the secret police. Romance soon blossomed, followed by correspondence; but Gheorghe's indiscreet letters soon aroused the interest of the Securitate. Plans for marriage and escape from Romania came to nothing, and the last Helena heard was an instruction never to write to him again as he had \"joined the police\". This book is Helena's account of her search for Gheorghe and the truth about his fate, a journey that led her into the Romanian underworld, to Orthodox monasteries and psychiatric prison-hospitals, and into contact with family friends and Securitate \"colonels\".","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49609203548433,"sku":"GOR004308409","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50927884075281,"sku":"GOR014127755","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1856195333.jpg?v=1751155127"},{"product_id":"alone-through-china-and-tibet-book-helena-drysdale-9780094672000","title":"Alone Through China and Tibet","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49610382770449,"sku":"GOR004526673","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51407429402897,"sku":"GOR003897884","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51523550576913,"sku":"GOR003451069","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0094672008.jpg?v=1751004963"},{"product_id":"dancing-with-the-dead-a-journey-through-zanzibar-and-madagascar-book-helena-drysdale-9781590480588","title":"Dancing with the Dead - A Journey Through Zanzibar and Madagascar","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50594723987729,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50594724938001,"sku":"GOR005656062","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1590480589.jpg?v=1751150869"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/de-ch\/collections\/autor-buecher-von-helena-drysdale.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}