French ladies slender and chic, French men wearing berets and riding bicycles with baguettes clamped under their arms when they are not flirting outrageously, and all the while the sun shines down benevolently upon uniform rows of ripening vegetables. Dreams are strange and unpredictable, and sometime so is la vie en rose. A pick from some of the best bits of the popular travel author's blog diaries reveal the minutiae of expat day to day life in rural France. A must-read for Susie Kelly fans and anybody thinking of, or dreaming of, moving to France.

     Returning home to a job I didn’t enjoy, that dream burned at my mind until, as a mature student in 1999, I was given the opportunity to take a year out and decided now was my time. This was at a time of huge advances in communication technology but I chose to journey without a mobile phone or any other means of communicating with the outside world – something we might struggle to comprehend these days. If I got into trouble, if I got injured, if I became lost, it was up to me to sort myself out. No close friends were willing to leave the comforts of home, so the fledgling internet did at least prove useful in finding a travel companion. But within nine days of the start of my journey I found myself alone, close to the bottom of the world and with many thousands of miles of the unknown still ahead. This book tells how the desire to fulfil a burning ten-year dream helped me overcome illness, injury, exhaustion, loneliness and so much more; how I, a normal guy from a working-class family in Leeds – among many other adventures – found myself singing to bears to keep them at bay, ran out of water crossing the driest desert in the world, had a volcano rain ash down on me and found myself hiding out from bandits most nights while pedalling through Mexico.

    Though local inhabitants had known about it for century, Bingham documented and photographed the ruins of a 15th century settlement nestled along a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley in Peru, placed so perfectly from a defensive standpoint that it’s believed the Spanish never conquered it and may have never known about it.

    It features the twenty-five breeds that most breeders and dog fanciers agree constitute the country’s canine heritage. Divided into three groupings—working dogs, companion dogs and hounds—the book provides detailed background notes to each breed, along with information on its physical characteristics, behaviour, uses, origins and history. Along with popular breeds like Caravan hounds (or Karuvanis), Chippiparais, Mudhol hounds, Pashmis, Rajapalayams and Rampur hounds the book also features lesser known breeds such as the Alaknoori and the Jonangi. The fruit of several years of travel and research into India’s dog breeds, as well as S. Theodore Baskaran’s hands-on experience of raising various dogs, this celebration of our dogs is a book that no dog lover can do without.