Author(s): Michael Kerr

Literature

The Telegraph's Deputy Travel Editor Michael Kerr has amassed the very best of the paper's writing on journeys by water - from ocean liners, cruise ships, tramp and African river steamers, all the way to single-handed yachtsmen and canoeists tackling the Missouri. Tall Ships on High Seas details the last voyage of the QE2 and the first of the biggest cruise liner ever built. There is an account of the 1936 launching of the Queen Mary in front of 150,000 onlookers on the Clyde. It features no less than Henry Stanley, writing exclusively for the Telegraph in the nineteenth century about his epic African journey down the Congo. Also included are pieces about Bombay's insanely crowded commuter ferries, Francis Chichester rounding Cape Horn, and a couple who tried to sail their amphibious Volkswagen Beetle around the world but only got as far as the North Sea. Anyone who enjoys reading Gavin Young, Eric Newby or Jonathan Raban's travel writing will love this book. Aurum's 2009 Telegraph anthology of Great Railway Journeys, Last Call for the Dining Car, was a Christmas sales success, going into 5 printings. It was a truly covetable book, with a beautiful cover and a contents list packed with accounts of fascinating journeys by superb authors from Michael Palin to Nicholas Crane and Lee Langley. Michael Kerr's follow up is sure to have similar appeal.