Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959) was one of the youngest members of Captain Scott's final expedition to the Antarctic. Cherry undertook an epic journey in the Antarctic winter to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin. The temperature fell to seventy below, it was dark all the time, his teeth shattered in the cold and the tent blew away. 'But we kept our tempers,' Cherry wrote, 'even with God.'After serving in the First War Cherry was invalided home, and with the zealous encouragement of his neighbour Bernard Shaw he wrote a masterpiece. In The Worst Journey in the World Cherry transformed tragedy and grief into something fine. But as the years unravelled he faced a terrible struggle against depression, breakdown and despair, haunted by the possibility that he could have saved Scott and his companions. This is the first biography of Cherry. Sara Wheeler, who has travelled extensively in the Antarctic, has had unrestricted access to new material and the full co-operation of Cherry's family.

Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Gerrard

Wheeler, Sara

Biographies & Memoirs

VINTAGE (RAND)

Magnetic North

Sports & Outdoors

Winter Sports

Vintage

O My America!: Second Acts in a New World

Shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book Award After reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as Terra Incognita and The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler rediscovered America thirty-five years after her first Greyhound trip across the country. She returns in turbulent midlife to trace the steps of six women who fled various sorts of trouble in nineteenth-century England and went to the United States to reinvent themselves. Her travel companions include Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and author of the biting Domestic Manners of the Americans; the actress Fanny Kemble, who shocked the nation with her passionate first-hand indictment of slavery; the prolifically pamphleteering economist Harriet Martineau; the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, who had never been more than twelve miles from her Yorkshire village before she sailed to the New World; the traveller Isabella Bird, whose many ailments remained in check as long as she was scaling the Rockies; and the novelist Catherine Hubback, niece of Jane Austen, who deposited her husband in a madhouse and rode the brand-new rails to San Francisco. Tough-minded outsiders, these women’s truest qualities emerged in a country as incomplete and tentative as their native land was staid and settled. And they discovered second acts for themselves at a time when the world expected them to disappear politely. From the swampy heat of Georgia’s Sea Islands to the icy purity of the Cascades, Sara Wheeler finds their path, and her own.

Community & Culture

Mud & Stars

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Terra incognita: Travels in Antarctica

Travel

Polar Regions

JONATHAN CAPE.

Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Leaders & Notable People

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'.

Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

Travelers & Explorers

Random House]

The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle

The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle

Travel Writing

In a series of remarkable books - Travels in a Thin Country, Terra Incognita, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry Garrard, Too Close to the Sun and The Magnetic North - Sara Wheeler has shown that she is not only one of the finest travel writers of her generation but a very fine biographer too. Published to coincide with her fiftieth birthday, Access All Areas gathers together a selection of her shorter pieces, both journalism and introductions to other books. As one would expect, the frozen poles of the earth feature often, whether she is spending the night in Captain Scott's hut or reliving the adventures of Shackleton and Nansen. But its hot places feature too - Malawi, Kerala, Cuba and Bangladesh. She writes brilliantly of her heroes - Mary Kingsley, Fanny Trollope, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris and Sybille Bedford - and about the pains and pleasures of writing biography. Worried that having her children would end her roaming, she took her children with her, to the Arctic, and on a brilliantly depicted cruise on the QE2. She learns to bellydance, to strip, and to walk on the wing of a biplane at 3000 feet. This is an immensely varied and satisfying collection.

Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2010

There is a literal Russian landscape, and there is its emotional, literary counterpart. In Mud and Stars, award-winning writer Sara Wheeler sets out to explore both. With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides – Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev, among others – Wheeler travels across eight time zones, from rinsed north-western beetroot fields and far-eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of ethnic soup that is the Caucasus. She follows nineteenth-century footsteps to make connections between then and now: between the places where flashing-epauletted Lermontov died in the aromatic air of Pyatigorsk, and sheaves of corn still stand like soldiers on a blazing afternoon, just like in Gogol’s stories. On the Trans-Siberian railway in winter she crunches across snowy platforms to buy dried fish from babushki, and in summer she sails the Black Sea where dolphins leapt in front of violet Abkhazian peaks. She also spends months in fourth-floor 1950s apartments, watching television with her hosts, her new friends bent over devices and moaning about Ukraine. At a time of deteriorating relations between Russia and the West, Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news – a Russia of humanity and daily struggles. She gives voice to the ‘ordinary’ people of Russia, and discovers how the writers of the Golden Age continue to represent their country today.

Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

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Books by Wheeler, Sara