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

'Funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel' Daily Telegraph

Sara Wheeler is Britain's foremost woman travel writer, and 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.

From happy days on India's Puri Express to an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!), and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl, Wheeler's adventures span the globe. She corrals reindeer with the Sámi in Arctic Sweden while towing her baby on a sledge, with a helpful herdsman advising her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing. As she writes in the introduction, when she set sail 'Role models were scarce in the travel-writing game.'

Launching at Nubility, Wheeler voyages, via small children, to the welcoming port of Invisibility (she leaves Immobility for the next volume). 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.'