Before We Set Sail

It is 1755 - 1756 within the deep interiors of West Africa. A boy of eleven years is kidnapped with his eight year old sister. Strap your sandals and embark on an intriguing journey with Olaudah Equiano as he weaves a captivating tale of escape and resale from one African slave master to another. Get lost in time as Olaudah renders the most enchanting accounts of the implausible events he encountered during his travels as a child slave, from the interiors to the coast of West Africa. Before We Set Sail offers a gripping, refreshingly witty and highly adventurous account of the Africa of 1755 - 56, from the double points of view of an African boy and a British adult writing in 1796. Out of 250 submissions, Before We Set Sail was one of six shortlisted for the Penguin Publishers Award for African Writing.

Championship racers and professional adventurers disclose their favorite destinations in an inspiring volume of stories, travel tips, and photos. Featuring some of the best-known men and women in the sport—Tom Whidden and Gary Jobson (members of the winning 1987 America’s Cup crew), Jeff Johnstone (of J-Boats), award-winning sailing writer Lin Pardey, and many others—this is a unique full-color celebration for sailors to relive their greatest memories or plan their next big adventure. The amazingly diverse places they’ve selected include: Australia: Fremantle and Sydney Bermuda: St. George’s Harbor Brazil: Bay of Ilha Grande California: Channel Islands and San Francisco Bay Chile: Cape Horn Italy: Costa Smeralda, Sardinia Maine: Boothbay Harbor, Penobscot Bay, Southwest Harbor Florida: Biscayne Bay and Key West Scotland: Firth of Clyde South Africa: Cape Town…and dozens more For each place, the sailor recommending the venue spins an entertaining yarn about their experience there, and each description is accompanied by a “make you want to go there now” photograph. From the relative indolence of cruising the Dodecanese or the British Virgin Islands, to the white-knuckle adventure of rounding Cape Horn, to the thrill of partaking in the regatta off Newport, Fifty Places to Sail Before You Die captures the rich and varied world of recreational sailing—and may just inspire you to set sail on some new adventures of your own.

Out of 250 manuscripts submitted by African writers across the globe, the manuscript "Before We Set Sail" was one of six shortlisted for the inaugural Penguin Publishers Award for African Writing. Before We Set Sail is the gripping account of the journey of eleven year Olaudah Equiano as a slave boy within the deep interiors of West Africa in 1755 - 56. Written by 'himself' as a freed slave resident in London in 1796, the narrative focuses on the thrilling adventures Olaudah encountered during the time he was enslaved in West Africa prior to being sold to British slave merchants.The book is presented as a sequel to the best selling first-ever slave autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano: Written by Himself.Before We Set Sail weaves a captivating tale of escape and resale from one African slave master to another, giving an enthralling and witty account of the Africa of 1755, from the double points of view of an unlettered African boy and a literate British adult, in a way that excites the reader's curiosity.Read more at www.beforewesetsail.com

'Truly unforgettable ... deserves to be read and studied by all' - Onjali Q. Rauf, bestselling author of The Boy at the Back of the Class Secrets from the past are the keys to the future...if two children can find them. Bold adventure, timely themes and breath-taking writing from award-winning author, Sita Brahmachari. Usha is devastated when her grandmother Kali Ma passes away. Then straight-talking Imtiaz arrives - her new adoptive sister - and the two girls clash instantly. They both feel lost. That is until Kali Ma's ghost appears...with a task for them. Immy's and Usha's home is full of history and secrets. Many years ago it was The House of the Ayahs - for those nannies who couldn't return to their Indian homeland - and Kali Ma made a promise she couldn't keep. She can't pass on to the other side until the girls fulfil it. Today, Usha and Immy's over-worked parents run the house as a home for refugees, but eviction threatens. The precious documents that could save them are lost. As the house slowly fills up with ghosts, that only Usha and Imtiaz can see, the girls realise they have more to save than just one grandmother's ghost. With help from their new friend Cosmo, Usha and Immy must set off on a quest through London, accompanied by two bickering ghosts, working together to find a series of objects that shine a magical light on their family's past and hold the clues to securing their future. If they can set the secrets of generations free, will they be in time to save their home? Endorsed by Amnesty International. *Sita Brahmachari is a World Book Day author for 2021 with gorgeous short story, The River Whale!*

Invest your time in reading the true masterpieces of world literature, the great works of the greatest masters of their craft, the revolutionary works, the timeless classics and the eternally moving poetry of words and storylines every person should experience in their lifetime: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen) A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) Dubliners (James Joyce) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) Howards End (E. M. Forster) Le Père Goriot (Honoré de Balzac) Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) Anne of Green Gables Series (L. M. Montgomery) The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame) Gitanjali (Rabindranath Tagore) Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith) The Beautiful and Damned (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne) Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper) Peter and Wendy (J. M. Barrie) The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas) Iliad & Odyssey (Homer) Kama Sutra Dona Perfecta (Benito Pérez Galdós) The Divine Comedy (Dante) The Rise of Silas Lapham (William Dean Howells) The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura) Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo) Red and the Black (Stendhal) Rob Roy (Walter Scott) Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope) Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome) Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) My Antonia (Willa Cather) The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton) The Awakening (Kate Chopin) Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis) The Four Just Men (Edgar Wallace) Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham) The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev) The Voyage Out (Virginia Woolf) Life is a Dream (Pedro Calderon de la Barca) Faust (Goethe) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche) Autobiography (Benjamin Franklin) The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

This fascinating anthology introduces readers to the literary side of Herman Melville's whaling world with an unprecedented collection of the original whaling texts from which Melville drew to create his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. The notorious 1820 sinking of the whaleship Essex inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, as recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick's bestselling book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex—now a major motion picture. But how exactly did Melville transmute the historic tragedy of the Essex into what is arguably the "Great American Novel"? Here, for the first time, R.D. Madison collects together Melville's personal "library" of whaling and whale-lore into a single volume and presents these primary sources in a way that readers can readily see how a horrific whaling tragedy became a literary masterpiece. But where did Moby-Dick begin? Prompted by sailor-author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Melville supplemented his own firsthand experience as a whaleman in the South Pacific with "libraries" of books that he "swum through" to create his whaling masterpiece. Scholars and lay readers alike have long wondered how he did it, and over the past 60 years, a very tight theory of inspiration and creation has emerged. It is very likely wrong. This volume gathers together for the first time all of the main texts that Melville encountered, including the accounts of the unique sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale that provided the climax for Moby-Dick. Melville scholar R. D. Madison examines what critics have said about Melville's response to the sinking and offers the challenging thesis that Melville did not even begin the book at all until spurred on by Dana in the spring of 1850.

This book is a candid and humourous account of the author's adventures in sailing. It begins with his first experiences as a teenager with rowing boats in the North East of England. Later he describes the joys of sailing dinghies and cruisers in the South West of England. These adventures range from smooth idylic sails in good weather to a full on ship wreck in storm conditions. His tales of learning to sail expand to yacht racing on the Swan River in Perth and in the Indian Ocean, Western Australia. His lively and candid descriptions of fellow yachtsmen and women he met while sailing add wit and pathos to his abiding love of the sea. The book should appeal not only to experienced yachtsmen but also to the 'arm-chair sailor' who likes to read about sailing. The title of the book is in reference to a comment made by his wife, Anne, when their sailing dinghy sprung a leak during their sail together.

Including stories from paradise and hard-won lessons inseamanship, Taleisin’s Tales reflects back to the first milesLin and Larry gained together on their second cruising boat – one they built lovingly with teak carvel planking over sawn black locust frames. The story takes the reader from launching and sea trials through those initial cautious 1000 coastal miles between California and the Sea of Cortez, discussing everything from sail handling to dinghy racing to the relative luxuries of bicycles and a custombuilt sitztub to encounters, both pleasant and surprising, with sailors and locals along the Baja peninsula. Then it launches the reader across the Pacific on Taleisin’s first offshore leg to French Polynesia, through the Cook Islands and Tonga, then on to New Zealand. In the style readers have come to know through the Pardeys’ ever popular Cruising in Seraffyn series and Lin’s award winning Bull Canyon, this book relates stories sometimes harrowing, sometimes cautionary, sometimes hilarious – and often heart-warming, especially when it comes to encounters with the people of the South Pacific who become family. If there is a lesson to be gained from reading Taleisin’s Tales, it’s that slowing the pace and taking each day as it comes brings unexpected moments of clarity and joy. And that sailing across an ocean on a small boat is not easy but, with the right partner and attitude, can be beautifully rewarding. Taleisin’s Tales takes the reader from Bull Canyon, California, to Kawau Island, New Zealand, where, after almost 28 years of voyaging on Taleisin, Lin and Larry now spend their time running a small nautical publishing company, managing a very small boatyard, puttering about on their fifteen-foot Herreshoff sloop and reflecting on their five decades of bluewater cruising.