Hearing Birds Fly
10 best books like Hearing Birds Fly (Louisa Waugh): The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong, The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan, Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan, Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared, Finding George Orwell in Burma, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, The Bread of Angels: A Memoir of Love and Faith, Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World, Home is a Roof Over a Pig: An American Family's Journey in China, Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth
The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong
| Author | Edward Gargan |
| ISBN | 0375705597 |
Along the Mekong, from northern Tibet to Lijiang, from Luang Prabang to Phnom Penh to Can Lo, I moved from one world to another, among cultural islands often ignorant of each other’s presence. Yet each island, as if built on shifting sands and eroded and reshaped by a universal sea, was re-forming itself,...
| Author | Alan Booth |
| ISBN | 1568361874 |
ALAN BOOTH'S CLASSIC OF MODERN TRAVEL WRITING
Traveling only along small back roads, Alan Booth traversed Japan's entire length on foot, from Soya at the country's northernmost tip, to Cape Sata in the extreme south, across three islands and some 2,000 miles of rural Japan. The Roads to Sata...
At age 24 Jamie Zeppa, a Canadian who had never been outside of North America, said goodbye to her fiancé and her plans for graduate school and moved to Bhutan, a remote Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas.
Beyond the Sky and the Earth is an autobiographical work that details her experiences and...
| Author | Christopher Robbins |
| ISBN | 0977743381 |
Closed to foreigners under Tsar and Soviet rule, Kazakhstan has remained largely hidden from the world, a remarkable feat for a country the size of Western Europe. Few would guess that Kazakhstan—a blank in Westerners' collective geography—turns out to be diverse, tolerant, and surprisingly...
Finding George Orwell in Burma
| Author | Emma Larkin |
| ISBN | 0143037110 |
A fascinating political travelogue that traces the life and work of George Orwell in Southeast Asia
Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, also known as Myanmar, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian."...
In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a naive Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet irrigation...
| Author | Stephanie Saldana |
| ISBN | 0385522002 |
A riveting memoir about one woman's journey into Syria under the Baathist regime and an unexpected love story between two strangers searching for meaning.
When Stephanie Saldana arrives in Damascus, she is running away from a broken heart and a haunted family history that she has crossed...
Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World
| Author | Yang Erche Namu |
| ISBN | 0316735493 |
This widely acclaimed memoir transports us to the remote reaches of the Himalayas, to a place the Chinese call "the country of daughters," to the home of the Moso, a society in which women rule. According to local tradition, marriage is considered a foreign practice; property is passed from mother to...
| Author | Aminta Arrington |
| ISBN | 1590208994 |
When all-American Aminta Arrington moves from suburban Georgia to a small town in China, she doesn't go alone. Her army husband and three young children, including an adopted Chinese daughter, uproot themselves too. Aminta hopes to understand the country with its long civilization, ancient philosophy,...
| Author | Lisa Napoli |
| ISBN | 0307453022 |
Lisa Napoli was in the grip of a crisis, dissatisfied with her life and her work as a radio journalist. When a chance encounter with a handsome stranger presented her with an opportunity to move halfway around the world, Lisa left behind cosmopolitan Los Angeles for a new adventure in the ancient Himalayan...
Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China
| Author | Colin Thubron |
| ISBN | 0099459329 |
Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron sets off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to Tibet, starting from a tropical paradise near the Burmese border to the windswept wastes of the Gobi desert and the far end of the Great Wall. What Thubron reveals...
| Author | Miranda Kennedy |
| ISBN | 1400067863 |
When twentysomething reporter Miranda Kennedy leaves her job in New York City and travels to India with no employment prospects, she longs to immerse herself in the turmoil and excitement of a rapidly developing country. What she quickly learns in Delhi about renting an apartment as a single woman—it’s...
| Author | Britta Das |
| ISBN | 1840244984 |
Often seen as a magical paradise at the end of the world, Bhutan is inaccessible to most travellers. Set against the dramatic scenery of the Himalaya, this beautiful memoir reveals hardships and happiness in a land almost untouched by the West. When Britta, a young physiotherapist, goes to work in a...
| Author | Mireya Mayor |
| ISBN | 1426207212 |
A quick examination of her roots, and one may never have guessed that Mireya Mayor would become the woman she is today. Yet, against all odds, this self-professed former "girly girl" daughter of overprotective Cuban immigrants blossomed from NFL cheerleader to Fulbright Scholar to field scientist...
| Author | Sara Wheeler |
| ISBN | 0375753656 |
Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral...
| Author | Linda Leaming |
| ISBN | 1401928463 |
Tucked away in the eastern end of the Himalayas lies Bhutan—a tiny, landlocked country bordering China and India. Impossibly remote and nearly inaccessible, Bhutan is rich in natural beauty, exotic plants and animals, and crazy wisdom. It is a place where people are genuinely content...
| Author | Stanley Stewart |
| ISBN | 1592281060 |
Vivid, hilarious, and compelling, this eagerly awaited book takes its place among the travel classics. It is a thrilling tale of adventure, a comic masterpiece, and an evocative portrait of a medieval land marooned in the modern world. Eight and a half centuries ago, under Genghis Khan, the Mongols...
| Author | Christiane Bird |
| ISBN | 0671027565 |
Fusing travelogue, historical inquiry, and interviews with Iranians from all walks of life, Neither East Nor West is a landmark contribution to travel writing and to cultural studies, as well as a timely illumination of a nation deeply misunderstood by most Westerners. In describing life in Iran...
| Author | George Crane |
| ISBN | 0553379089 |
In 1959 a young monk named Tsung Tsai (Ancestor Wisdom) escapes the Red Army troops that destroy his monastery, and flees alone three thousand miles across a China swept by chaos and famine. Knowing his fellow monks are dead, himself starving and hunted, he is sustained by his mission: to carry on the...
| Author | Justin Marozzi |
| ISBN | 0306816210 |
During the classical age of Greece, Herodotus wrote the first history text. But what he created was much more than this. Informed by his own travels, his historical work digresses more than it chronicles, with tales of the lands and peoples he visited. As Michael Ondaatje once famously suggested, “What...
The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China
| Author | Rosemary Mahoney |
| ISBN | 0618035494 |
One year before the protests in Tiananmen Square, Rosemary Mahoney participated in a teaching exchange between Harvard and Hangzhou University. At Hangzhou she was able to overcome her students' usual rigidity and achieve a rare and intimate glimpse of their culture and their attitudes. This remarkable...
Ripe for the Picking (Italy series, #2)
| Author | Annie Hawes |
| ISBN | 0141008903 |
During the course of Annie Hawes' new book, local culinary superstar, Ciccio, gradually takes over as Annie's constant companion. How irresistible is a man who first demonstrates his affection and esteem by inviting her into his vineyard to help himmix up cow manure, which she spends the afternoon...
Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China
| Author | Wang Ping |
| ISBN | 0385721366 |
When Wang Ping was nine years old, she secretly set about binding her feet with elastic bands. Footbinding had by then been outlawed in China, women’s feet “liberated,” but at that young age she desperately wanted the tiny feet her grandmother had–deformed and malodorous as they were. By first...
