Sara Wheeler

The first woman ever sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation in Antarctica offers a sharply observed, lively account of expeditions into the wilderness of Antarctica, including her own. 10,000 first printing.

Travels in Antarctica

Terra Incognita

notes from the Arctic Circle

The magnetic north

Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world.

A Journey Through Chile

Travels in a Thin Country

A witty and insightful tour of contemporary Russia, using its Golden Age writers, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, as guides: part history, part sociopolitical commentary, this text reveals the heart of a country that never fails to surprise readers.

Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

Mud and Stars

Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959) was one of the youngest members of Captain Scott's final expedition to the Antarctic. Cherry, despite his short sight, undertook an epic journey in the Antarctic winter to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin. The temperature fell to 70 degrees below zero, it was dark all the time, his teeth shatterd in the cold and the tent blew away. But we kept our tempers, Cherry wrote, even with God.

A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Cherry

An elegant travel writer discovers Chile, the country squeezed in between a vast ocean and running along the longest mountain range on Earth.

Travels in Russia with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of TheGolden Age

Fango e stelle. Viaggio in Russia in compagnia di Puskin, Tolstoj e altri geni dell'Età dell'oro

A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title More than a decade ago, Sara Wheeler traveled to Antarctica to understand a continent nearly lost to myth and lore. In the widely acclaimed, bestselling Terra Incognita, she chronicled her quest to find a hidden history buried in Antarctica's extreme surroundings. Now, Wheeler journeys to the opposite pole to create a definitive picture of life on the fringes. In The Magnetic North, she takes full measure of the Arctic: at once the most pristine place on earth and the locus of global warming. Inspired by the spiraling shape of a reindeer-horn bangle, she travels counterclockwise around the North Pole through the territories belonging to Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, marking the transformations of what once seemed an unchangeable landscape. As she witnesses the mounting pollution concentrated at the pole, Wheeler reckons with the illness of the whole organism of the earth. Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, shadowing the endless Trans-Alaska Pipeline with a tough Idaho-born outdoorswoman, herding reindeer with the Lapps, and visiting the haunting, deceptively peaceful lands of the Gulag, Wheeler brings the Arctic's many contradictions to life. The Magnetic North is an urgent, beautiful book, rich in dramatic description and vivid reporting. It is a singular, deeply personal portrait of a region growing daily in global importance.

Notes from the Arctic Circle

The Magnetic North

Sara Wheeler was the first woman selected by the American government to be the "Writer in Residence at the US South Pole Station". She spent six weeks at the pole. In this book she reveals how people live on the bases and how the landscape affects them.

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.'

A Woman's Life on the Road - 'Funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel' Daily Telegraph

Glowing Still

An authorized biography of Antarctic explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard describes his adventures during Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole and his masterful account of his polar adventures, "The Worst Journey in the World."

In O My America!, the travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler embarks on a journey across the United States, guided by the adventures of six women who reinvented themselves as they chased the frontier west. Wheeler's career has propelled her from pole to pole--camping in Arctic igloos, tracking Indian elephants, contemplating East African swamps so hot that toads explode--but as she stared down the uncharted territory of middle age, she found herself in need of a guide. "Fifty is a tough age," she writes. "Role models are scarce for women contemplating a second act." Scarce, that is, until she stumbled upon Fanny Trollope. In 1827, Fanny, mother of Anthony, swapped England for Ohio with hopes of bolstering the family finances. There, failure and disappointment hounded the immigrant for three years before she returned home to write one of the most sensational travel accounts of the nineteenth century. Domestic Manners of the Americans made an instant splash on both sides of the Atlantic, where readers both relished and reviled Trollope's caustic take on the newly independent country. Her legacy became the stuff of legend: "Trollopize" emerged as a verb meaning "to abuse the American nation"; Mark Twain judged her the best foreign commentator on his country; the last king of France threw a ball in her honor. Fanny Trollope was forty-nine when she set out for America, and Wheeler, approaching fifty herself, was smitten. Fanny was living proof of life after fertility, and she led Wheeler to other trailblazers: the actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, the radical sociologist Harriet Martineau, the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, the traveler Isabella Bird, and the novelist Catherine Hubback--women born within half a century of one another who all reinvented themselves in a transforming America, the land of new beginnings. In O My America!, Wheeler tracks her subjects from the Mississippi to the cinder cones of the Mayacamas at the tail end of the Cascades, armed with two sets of maps for each adventure: one current and one the women before her would have used. Bright, spirited, and tremendous tantrum-throwers, these ladies proved to be the best travel companion Wheeler could have asked for. "I had more fun writing this book than all my previous books put together," she writes--and it shows. Ambitious and full of life, O My America! is not only a great writer's reckoning with a young country, but also an exuberant tribute to fresh starts, second acts, and six unstoppable women.

Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World

O My America!

After reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as 'Terra Incognita' and 'The Magnetic North', Sara Wheeler rediscovered America 35 years after her first Greyhound trip across the country. She returns in turbulent midlife to trace the steps of 6 women who fled various sorts of trouble in 19th-century England and went to the United States to reinvent themselves.

Second Acts in a New World

"Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover - Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. There, concluded his obituary in The Times, 'No one who ever met him, whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell ... He was different from everyone else. He always left an impression of greatness - there is no other word - and aroused interest as no one else could.'" "Too Close to the Sun is a story of big guns and small planes, princes from England and sultans from Zanzibar, a famous divorce case, a Welsh castle and a Gilbertine priory, marauding lions, syphilis, bankruptcy, self-destruction and the tragedy of the human heart. Sara Wheeler reveals the truth behind Finch Hatton's love affairs with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl Markham and with Karen Blixen, the Danish coffee-farmer who famously immortalised their romance in her memoir Out of Africa. She tracks her quarry from a dreamlike Edwardian childhood in a Lincolnshire mansion through to the purgatorial battlefields of the East Africa Campaign - one of the last remaining untold stories of the First World War. As with her biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, she uses a biography to illuminate a generation." "An elusive hero in the mythic story of the British settlers in East Africa, Finch Hatton was the open road made flesh. He crashed his Gypsy Moth into the Voi hills in 1931, dying 'as he would have chosen in the open air, amid the wide spaces that he loved, fearless and free to the end'."--BOOK JACKET.

The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

Too Close to the Sun

A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter, Denys Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the unforgettable Out of Africa. Now esteemed British biographer Sara Wheeler tells the truth about this extraordinarily charismatic adventurer. Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of effortless elegance and boundless power. In 1910, searching for something new, he arrived in British East Africa and fell in love–with a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was about to change forever. In Nairobi, Finch Hatton met Karen Blixen and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century. Intellectual equals, Finch Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry. Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-game hunter and became an expert bush pilot. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.”

The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

Denys Finch Hatton was adored by women and idolized by men. A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter, Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the unforgettable stories in Out of Africa. Now esteemed British biographer Sara Wheeler tells the truth about this extraordinarily charismatic adventurer. Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of effortless elegance and boundless power. Tall and graceful, with the soul of a poet and an athlete’s relaxed masculinity, he became a hero without trying at Eton and Oxford. In 1910, searching for novelty and danger, Finch Hatton arrived in British East Africa and fell in love–with a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was about to change forever. Wheeler brilliantly conjures the mystical beauty of Kenya at a time when teeming herds of wild animals roamed unmolested across pristine savannah. No one was more deeply attuned to this beauty than Finch Hatton–and no one more bitterly mourned its passing when the outbreak of World War I engulfed the region in a protracted, bloody guerrilla conflict. Finch Hatton was serving as a captain in the Allied forces when he met Karen Blixen in Nairobi and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century. With delicacy and grace, Wheeler teases out truth from fiction in the liaison that Blixen herself immortalized in Out of Africa. Intellectual equals, bound by their love for the continent and their inimitable sense of style, Finch Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry. Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-game hunter and became an expert bush pilot; his passion that led to his affair with the notoriously unconventional aviatrix Beryl Markham. But Markham was no more able to hold him than Blixen had been. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.” In painting a portrait of an irresistible man, Sara Wheeler has beautifully captured the heady glamour of the vanished paradise of colonial East Africa. In Too Close to the Sun she has crafted a book that is as ravishing as its subject.

Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover - Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford, he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. Sara Wheeler reveals the truth behind his love affairs with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl Markham, and - famously - with Karen Blixen, a romance immortalised in her memoir Out of Africa. 'No one who ever met him', his Times obituary concluded, 'whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell'.

Dea Birkett

A collection of previously unpublished women's travel writing, including contributions from the editors and Kate Pullinger, Suzanne Moore, Mary Russell, Lucretia Stewart, Imogen Stubbs, Shena MacKay, Kathleen Jamie, Urvashi Butalia, Lesley Downer.

The Penguin Book of Women's New Travel Writing

Amazonian

Adventures in going forth and staying put from one of our greatest travel writers In vivid, urgent books such as Terra Incognita and The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler reckoned with the allure and brutality of life on the fringes, exploring distant lands with an extraordinary sensitivity to history, to place, and to the people who inhabit them. Access All Areas collects the best essays and journalism by a writer who has used extreme travel as a means to explore an inner landscape. Ranging from Albania to the Arctic, Wheeler attends a religion seminar aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 and defrosts her underwear inside an igloo. She treks to distant Tierra del Fuego—"a place where nothing ever happened"—and to the swamps of Malawi, a place so hot that toads explode. She crosses dubious borders with nothing but a kidney donor card for ID and learns to wing walk and belly dance, though not at the same time. Charming, scathing, restless, and eternally amused, the writer we meet in Access All Areas has spent a lifetime investigating roots and rootlessness. Seeking only to satisfy her own curiosity, Wheeler shows us the world.

Sara Wheeler

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