The story of six young men crossing the Pacific on a balsa wood raft makes an 'incredible adventure which happens to be true, and a book whose sales are reconed in millions

Politicians lead strange lives, but nothing is odder than the adventures of an ex-politician. In this wise and funny book John Button tells us what he's been up to since leaving the Senate in 1993. He declares himself psychotic in China and recalls a love affair in Rome. He exchanges letters with the mysterious Hannah Prisk, and visits the fourteenth most profitable restaurant in the United States.
We see him failing to do his Christmas shopping, jogging in New York and losing his money at the Melbourne Cup. Along the way reflects on everything from technological change and political correctness to election campaigns and Australia's relationship with Asia. And he meets the oddest people on aeroplanes.

On the 31st October 1999 Jesse Martin, in his yacht, Lionheart, completed the last great adventure of the twentieth century becoming the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world. He was eighteen years old and didn't know the meaning of impossible. After 50 000km and 328 days at sea he returned home to Port Phillip Bay and a waiting crowd of 20 000 onlookers, having lived his dream.

The record of a six month journey which took Gerald Durrell, his wife Jacquie, and two cameramen through New Zealand, Australia and Malaya. The object was, first, to see what was being done about the conservation of wildlife in these countries, and secondly, to make a series of television films for the BBC.

When Lillian Beckwith advertised for a secluded place in the country, she received a letter with the following unusual description of an isolated Hebridean croft: 'Surely it's that quiet even the sheeps themselves on the hills is lonely and as to the sea it's that near as I use it myself everyday for the refuals...' Her curiosity aroused, Beckwith took up the invitation.

Six weeks after falling in love with his next door neighbour, Australian travel writer Peter Moore suggested a romantic trip through Central America - as you do! Over the next six months Peter and the Girl Next Door battled hurricanes, mosquitoes, uncooperative border officials and over-sexed Mexican commuters. It shines an unrelenting spotlight on the highs and lows of traveeling with a partner - and proves once and for all that there is a world of difference between men and women.

A mountaineering travelogue of dazzling variety, the story moves from the camaraderie of deprived Russian climbers in the little-known peaks in the Tien Shan to the awesome experience of the North Face of the Eiger, from a rumbustious motorbike ride across Asia to hitch hiking across Australia with a psychotic lorry driver.