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Arabian Sands

Wilfred Thesiger · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Roughing It

Mark Twain · 558 pages

Travel WritingDesertNonfictionClassics
❤️

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot

Travel WritingDesertNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback (Vintage Departures)

Robyn Davidson · 280 pages

“I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes.... There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns…” For Robyn Davidson, one of these moments comes at age twenty-seven in Alice Springs, a dodgy town at the frontier of the vast Australian desert. Davidson is intent on walking the 1,700 miles of

DesertTravel WritingNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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The Road to Mecca

Muhammad Asad · 380 pages

This autobiographical work by one of Europe's best known convert to Islam gives us a rounded portrait of a man in search of adventure and truth. It is part spiritual autobiography, part summary of the author's intuitive insights into Islam and the Arabs, part an impressive travelogue. Punctuated with abundant adventure, moments of contemplation, colorful narrative, brilliant description and lively

DesertTravel WritingNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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In Xanadu

William Dalrymple · 319 pages

Travel WritingDesertNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea · 346 pages

Autobiographical account of two year's spent in a village of southern Iraq. The author accompanied her husband, who was doing anthropological research in the area.

Travel WritingDesertNonfictionAnthropology
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Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Paul Theroux · 494 pages

"A rich and insightful travel book in the tradition that made Paul Theroux's reputation, Dark Star Safari takes us the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, forgotten train, and rusting steamer. Theroux confronts delay, discomfort, bullets, and bad food while encountering a remarkable mix of places and people. Beginning in Cairo and ending in Cape Town, he goes on the ultimate safari to the true hea

Travel WritingDesertNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses

Bruce Feiler · 488 pages

The author recounts his ten-thousand-mile journey across the Middle East in search of the roots of the Bible to discover whether it was an abstraction or a living, breathing entity.

Travel WritingDesertNonfiction
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Sahara

Michael Palin · 256 pages

Michael Palin's epic voyages have seen him circumnavigate the globe, travel from the North to the South Pole and circle the countries of the Pacific Ocean, but this was perhaps the greatest challenge yet: to cross the vast and merciless Sahara desert. As the journey unfolds, the Sahara reveals not the emptiness of endless sand dunes, but a huge and diverse range of cultures and landscapes and a lo

Travel WritingDesertNonfiction
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The Road to Oxiana

Robert Byron · 292 pages

Of the journey by travel writer Robert Byron to the Middle East, this serves as a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now innaccessible to most Western travellers, and a nostalgic look back at a more innocent time.

Travel WritingDesertClassicsNonfiction
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Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest

Douglas Preston · 480 pages

Douglas Preston's Cities of Gold is a riveting account of his journey in the footsteps of Coronado, the legendary 16th-century explorer and conquistador who led the first European expedition through the American Southwest. Preston and a friend, Walter Nelson, set out on horseback across one thousand miles of vast deserts and unknown mountains retracing Coronado's search for the fabled Seven Cities

Travel WritingDesertNonfiction
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Wind, Sand, and Stars

Antoine de Saint-Exupery · 258 pages

English translation of "Terre des hommes". Autobiographical account of air travel, captures the grandeur, danger, and isolation of flight.

DesertTravel WritingNonfiction
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Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey · 270 pages

An account of the author's experiences, observations, and reflections as a seasonal park ranger in southeast Utah. When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road an

DesertTravel WritingNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

Ellen Meloy · 330 pages

In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise--the color and the gem--to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape. From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great

DesertTravel WritingNonfiction
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In Patagonia

Bruce Chatwin · 250 pages

"An exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land, Bruce Chatwin's exquisite account of his journey through Patagonia teems with evocative descriptions, remarkable bits of history, and unforgettable anecdotes. Fueled by an unmistakable lust for life and adventure and a singular gift for storytelling, Chatwin treks through "the uttermost part of the ea

Travel WritingDesertNonfiction
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Kon-Tiki: Across The Pacific In A Raft

Thor Heyerdahl · 239 pages

Presents the Kon-Tiki expedition led by explorer Thor Heyerdahl as he and his crew travel from South America and Polynesia on a raft made from balsa wood.

Travel WritingClassicsNonfictionAnthropology
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Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir

Agatha Christie Mallowan, Agatha Christie · 192 pages

Agatha Christie was already a celebrated writer of mysteries in 1930 when she married archaeologist Max Mallowan. She enthusiastically joined him on archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, providing backgrounds for novels and "everyday doings and happenings". Pre-war Syria years are remembered here, not chronologically, but in a cluster of vignettes about servants and aristocrats who pepper

Travel WritingDesertNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (The Western Frontier Library Series)

Isabella L. Bird, Daniel J. Boorstin · 276 pages

Travel WritingClassicsNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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The Secret Knowledge of Water

Craig Childs · 288 pages

Deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to seasoned explorers. Craig Childs has spent years in the deserts of the American West, and his treks through arid lands in search of water reveal the natural world at its most extreme.

DesertTravel WritingNonfiction
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Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

Robert Louis Stevenson · 209 pages

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes recounts Robert Louis Stevenson's 120 mile, 12 day hike, accompanied only by his stubborn and unwieldy donkey, through the Cevennes of south-central France. A pioneering piece of outdoor literature, it is one of Stevenson's earliest works, and one of the earliest accounts of hiking and camping for recreation rather than necessity. Stevenson's route is still po

Travel WritingClassicsNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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The Colossus of Maroussi

Henry Miller · 244 pages

"The Colossus of Maroussi is an impressionist travelogue by Henry Miller, which was first published in 1941 by Colt Press of San Francisco. It is set in pre-war Greece of 1939, and is ostensibly a characterization of the "Colossus" of the title, George Katsimbalis, a poet and raconteur. The work is frequently heralded as Miller's best."--Wikipedia.

Travel WritingClassicsNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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A Time of Gifts

Patrick Leigh Fermor · 304 pages

The author presents a chronicle of his journey, at the age of 18, on foot across central Europe, through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire, up the Rhine, and down to the Danube, capturing an unrecoverable time in Europe before the devastation of World War II.

Travel WritingClassicsNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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Around the World in Seventy-Two Days

Nellie Bly

Nelly Bly, inspired by Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days," sets out to break that book's record, starting her journey by visiting M. and Mme. Jules Verne in their home in France.

Travel WritingClassicsNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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Long Way Down

Ewan McGregor, Charley Boorman, Jeff Gulvin · 320 pages

Travel WritingDesertNonfictionMemoir & Biography
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