These Trailblazer guides … are a godsend for independent travelers.
— Travel & Leisure
Preview an Excerpt
Following Miss Bell - Travels Around Turkey in the Footsteps of Gertrude Bell
by: Pat Yale
Price: £11.99 BUY NOW
ISBN 978-1912716-35-7
396pp
216 x 135mm
60 B&W photos,
8 maps
- 'affectionate, entertaining ... a fitting tribute to Gertrude Bell.'
- Cornucopia Magazine, December 2023 - 'This account is valuable ... a bit of a detective story.'
- Anglo-Turkish Society, November 2023 - I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is an old fashioned ‘footsteps’ book with no stuntish symbolism of the personal redemption variety.
- Sara Wheeler, The Spectator, September 2023 - This meticulously researched and beautifully written travelogue reminded me of William Dalrymple's 'In Xanadu' and 'From the Holy Mountain'
- Goodreads.com, October 2023
-- 'skilful story-telling'; 'a book like no other - juxtaposing two different timelines and two separate worlds.'; 'a glimpse of Bell's early days as an explorer and recounts the journey that would turn her into that ambitious political player who became an advisor to kings!'
- The Markas Review
‘Pat Yale takes us on an epic adventure through time, space and the magical landscapes that bewitched a young English woman in the 1900s. Beautifully written, it entranced me utterly.’
Barbara Nadel (author of the Inspector İkmen series of crime novels)
In 1889 Gertrude Bell, the great British archaeologist, writer and explorer, arrived in Constantinople (Istanbul) on the first of many visits to what is now Turkey. Over the next 25 years, she would travel the length and breadth of the country, crossing the Tigris on a raft of inflated goatskins and taking the earliest photographs of remote corners of the country.
Veteran guidebook writer Pat Yale set out to retrace Bell’s Turkish adventures as one British traveller following another. Her journey took her to the site on the Syrian border where she met Lawrence of Arabia, to forgotten monasteries with solitary occupants and to villages where trilingual inhabitants recalled a more multicultural past. Along the way, she rubbed shoulders with adherents of faiths that barely survive in modern Turkey, with refugees struggling to make new lives, and with myriad taxi drivers whose stories exemplify the Turkish dream.
Interwoven with each other, the tales of these two women’s travels evoke a Turkey of then and now that is so much more complex than its modern tourist image suggests.
Interviews with Pat Yale about her book
With Simon Calder and Mick Webb:
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/youshouldhavebeenthere
Turkey Book Talk:
Price: £11.99 buy online now…
Latest tweets