Adrift in Caledonia                               Buy Online

ONE clear morning in May, Nick Thorpe left his Edinburgh flat, ducked off the commuter route and hitched a ride aboard a little white canal boat, heading west towards the sea.

It was the first mutinous step in a delightful boat-hopping odyssey that would take him 2500 miles through Scotland’s canals, lochs and coastal waters, from the industrial Clyde to the scattered islands of Viking Shetland. With no transport of his own, the optimistic writer relied on an eccentric cast of sailors, visionaries and nautical nomads, boarding anything from a fishing trawler to a rowing tub to a yellow submarine... More

Eight Men and a Duck                         Buy Online

ON A fateful South American bus trip, journalist Nick Thorpe overheard an improbable plan: to sail 2,500 miles to Easter Island on a boat made of reeds. Intrigued by this modern-day Kon-Tiki, he blagged his way on board only to find himself with nagging questions. Why did the crew include a tree surgeon, a jewellery salesman and a duck? What had happened to the navigator? Did anybody actually know how to sail? And, most importantly, where was the life raft? Eight Men and a Duck charts this most eccentric of Pacific voyages as it lurched between high drama and high farce... More