Here are 80 books that The Long Ride Home fans have personally recommended if you like
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Most motorcycle travellers spend months planning their trips but I took off on a whim having been lured by romance and tales of the open road. When my conventional life fell apart, I surprised even myself by flying to India and buying a brand new 500cc Enfield Bullet motorcycle and began my haphazard global wanderings learning to trust that the world I had been told was a dangerous place, wasn't at all (except for a couple of occasions at sea!) I liked the meandering life so much, it became a way of life.
I live in a small space with little room for books I don’t want to re-read. This one stays! Paddy chose his travel bike, a 2002 Aprilia Pegaso 650ie, because it was cheap. His ‘mend and make do’ approach was put to good use on this journey in the Americas, time-defined by how long the money lasted. I delighted in his eye for the puzzling and ridiculous, and how he depicts the essence of the people and places he sees. Spotting a fellow non-planner, I was hooked when I read, “…the plans of man are but thoughts and ideas easily revoked should anything more interesting crop up in the meantime.” So did this Irishman successfully complete his quest? Where is Puerto Faraglioni anyway?
A Motorcycle Adventure In Search Of The Improbable
It’s 2008. The world enters economic meltdown. A global flu pandemic looms. An historical US presidential election is taking place and, somewhere in the Americas, a lone Irishman is coaxing his temperamental Italian motorcycle through another electrical breakdown…
Interspersed with anecdote, social observation and liberal doses of humour, this book follows writer and seasoned overland traveller Paddy Tyson, through his battle with bureaucracy, bike breaking road surfaces, illness, accident, gun toting police and a pasty Celtic complexion remarkably unsuited to the Central American sun.
Most motorcycle travellers spend months planning their trips but I took off on a whim having been lured by romance and tales of the open road. When my conventional life fell apart, I surprised even myself by flying to India and buying a brand new 500cc Enfield Bullet motorcycle and began my haphazard global wanderings learning to trust that the world I had been told was a dangerous place, wasn't at all (except for a couple of occasions at sea!) I liked the meandering life so much, it became a way of life.
The Sahara Desert, more used to Bedouins and camels, had never seen a motorcycle before let alone two Englishwomen riding one. Setting off from London in December 1934, Theresa Wallach and Florence Blenkiron rode their 600cc Panther through Africa from north to south. They maintained a ‘why not?’ attitude that got them through despite frequent punctures, delays whilst waiting for permits and none of the technology provided for today’s motorcycle traveller. These two qualified engineers who had already broken motorcycle speed records at Brooklands, took their motorcycle outfit and trailer with not even a compass... just a map that showed each oasis on the way. I was in a permanent state of suspense when reading about each encounter they experienced and their outstanding ingenuity and perseverance.
The remarkable story of two women, the first in the world to drive the length of Africa, and the first to cross the Sahara on a motorcycle. London to Cape Town overland by motorcycle and sidecar, pulling a trailer. No roads, no back up - just straight across the Sahara through equatorial Africa, and South to the Cape - in 1934/35, without even a compass! Undeterred by nomads, sand drifts, heat, rain, rivers, breakdowns and politics, Theresa Wallach and Florence Blenkiron completed a journey that might well defeat a modern motorcycle, and Florence even rode back as far as the…
Most motorcycle travellers spend months planning their trips but I took off on a whim having been lured by romance and tales of the open road. When my conventional life fell apart, I surprised even myself by flying to India and buying a brand new 500cc Enfield Bullet motorcycle and began my haphazard global wanderings learning to trust that the world I had been told was a dangerous place, wasn't at all (except for a couple of occasions at sea!) I liked the meandering life so much, it became a way of life.
What I like about this book is that Peggy writes as if riding a 125cc BSA Bantam through Canada, North America, and Mexico with an Airedale dog as pillion is quite the normal thing to do! In 1951, she left Liverpool for Nova Scotia. Arriving with only $60, she took various jobs to fund the two years she spent on the trip. I identified with this as I worked as a nurse in New Zealand during my own motorcycle travels. Her matter-of-fact attitude is smile-worthy, as she describes her wonderful experiences. “Oppy” the BSA proves perfect for the job. Matelot, the dog who travels on a metal box behind her, adjusts to his life on the road with similar alacrity.
This is a tale about an incredible trio: Oppy, the indomitable motorcycle, its 125-pound frame swaying under three times its weight; Matelot, the automotive Airedale, perched on his box, ears flying in the breeze; and the gasoline gypsy, Peggy Iris Thomas, who bumped her way over 14,000 miles of the United States, Mexico and Canada. There is a touch of the vagabond in all of us. But few have the determination and courage that started Peggy off from Liverpool in the spring of 1951 with 60 dollars in her pocket and the gleam of adventure in her eye. Her new…
Most motorcycle travellers spend months planning their trips but I took off on a whim having been lured by romance and tales of the open road. When my conventional life fell apart, I surprised even myself by flying to India and buying a brand new 500cc Enfield Bullet motorcycle and began my haphazard global wanderings learning to trust that the world I had been told was a dangerous place, wasn't at all (except for a couple of occasions at sea!) I liked the meandering life so much, it became a way of life.
Some motorcycle travel books say little about the motorbike itself but I like the nuts and bolts in a story of this genre. This book is very much about the bike. Steve’s Ariel was fifty-five years old and he was sixty-six when he embarked on his trip from Capetown to South Luangwa. I identified with Steve; neither of us had any modern gadgetry nor much in the way of mechanical expertise, therefore we both discovered new levels of patience and were blessed with experiencing people’s generosity in a different culture together with spectacular scenery. Like me, he thought of himself and his motorbike as ‘we’; when you travel solo, it is like a partnership. There’s nothing like travelling with a classic motorcycle as your (sometimes frustrating!) companion.
When classic motorcycle author Steve Wilson planned his 6,000-mile ride through Africa, perhaps his last real run on two wheels before the bus pass took over, the journey sounded challenging enough - just two Brits on 1950s Ariels, using their own resources to survive life on the wild roads. It became even more hair-raising when events meant he would have to do the ride solo. In this moving account Steve chronicles the entire experience: bike preparation, organisation, mechanical mayhem, personal discovery and - one of the reasons for the trip - raising a cheque for GBP2,000 for a small school…
Literary agents often say they are looking for books about ‘quirky’ female protagonists. I’m more entertained by female characters who feel real to me. When I write, I make myself uncomfortable a lot of the time, trying to express the many ways people both disguise and reveal the truth. I blame my devotion to my parents for this because when I left home in Massachusetts for college in the foreign land of Indiana, studied for a year in China, then studied in Italy, then worked in Taiwan, then moved to Japan, and later to Singapore, I wrote them copious descriptive, emotional letters. My parents are gone now, but in a way, I’m still doing that.
I don’t often read books more than once, but this one I have, and I know I will read it again. The woman whose life is revealed this time is 70-year-old Nora Porteous. She has returned to her native Brisbane, Australia after having escaped it by marriage to Sydney, and having escaped that marriage to London. She now reflects wryly on how she developed throughout those years of hardship and joy as she also experiences the changes in the neighbourhood she ran from decades before. As we move through both her memories of the past and her experience of the present, the details that help us to understand her are extraordinary: ‘The man is unlocking the door. I have had to talk and smile too much in his car, and as I wait I consciously rest my face.’
One of Australia’s most celebrated novels: one woman’s journey from Australia to London
Nora Porteous, a witty, ambitious woman from Brisbane, returns to her childhood home at age seventy. Her life has taken her from a failed marriage in Sydney to freedom in London; she forged a modest career as a seamstress and lived with two dear friends through the happiest years of her adult life.
At home, the neighborhood children she remembers have grown into compassionate adults. They help to nurse her back from pneumonia, and slowly let her in on the dark secrets of the neighborhood in the…
I left home in Melbourne to spend a year travelling in Asia when I was in my mid-twenties. I ended up living abroad for a decade in London, Bangladesh, and Myanmar before returning to Sydney in 2016. My first book is about the four years I lived in Myanmar and I’m currently writing my second, which is about the year I spent backpacking from Cambodia to Pakistan. My third book will be about the three years I worked as a journalist in Bangladesh. My plan is to write a ‘trilogy’ of memoirs. Living abroad has enriched my life and travel memoirs are one of my favourite genres, both as a reader and a writer.
This is a really funny book. It is the second volume of Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs, and it’s set in London in the sixties. James moves to London from Australia to find fame and fortune as a writer and playwright, but things do not go smoothly. I remember snorting with laughter as he describes having no money and nowhere to live, so he crashes at a friend’s place. His friend has bought just a new mattress and James has no blankets and is freezing, so he sleeps in the plastic packaging that the mattress arrives in. He said he rustled like a packet of chips all night long.
In the first volume of Clive James's autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, we said farewell to our hero as he set sail from Sydney Harbour, bound for London, fame and fortune. Finding the first of these proved relatively simple; the second two less so. Undaunted, Clive moved into a bed and breakfast in a Swiss Cottage where he practised the Twist, anticipated poetical masterpieces and worried about his wardrobe . . .
Falling Towards England is the entertaining and erudite second part in Clive James' life story, which he continues in May Week Was in June, North Face of Soho and The…
I arrived in Sydney in the 90s knowing as much as one brief peruse the Berlitz Guide could provide me. For the next 25 years I immersed myself in its beautiful harbour and beaches whilst writing four novels, all set in my hometown of London. But when I sat down to write my fifth novel, The Unforgiving City, set in 1890s Sydney, I drew a complete blank. What was my adopted city’s history? Did it even have one? If so, where was it? By the time I’d finished the novel I’d unearthed a whole other, hidden, Sydney. I will never view my new home town the same way again.
Published in 1934, this is Stead’s first novel, and its Modernistic portrayal of a loosely connected group of young men and women existing and interacting in a poverty-wracked but rapidly changing between-the-Wars Sydney caused a literary storm at the time. The City, caught between its Colonial heritage and its future as a modern Twentieth Century metropolis is the real star of the novel even as its seven bewildered, beleaguered characters roam its bay and suburbs, its libraries, university, and pubs, attempting to negotiate their changing city and their place in it. I couldn’t write a novel about Sydney without visiting Christina Stead’s Sydney first.
Originally published in 1934, Seven Poor Men of Sydney is Christina Stead's first novel, a brilliant portrayal of a group of men and women living in Sydney in the 1920s amid conditions of poverty and social turmoil. Set against the vividly drawn backgrounds of Fisherman's (Watson's) Bay and the innercity slums, the various characters seek to resolve their individual spiritual dilemmas through politics, religion and philosophy. Their struggles, their pain and their frustrations are portrayed with consummate skill in this memorable evocation of a city and an era.
I’m an author, poet, and editor who works in natural history and social history publishing by day, explaining the unique flora and fauna, culture, and spirit of this ancient continent. By night, I moonlight as a fiction author, writing whatever takes my fancy. Seeing Australia and understanding Australia aren’t always the same thing in a country with unforgiving stony desert at its heart, more venomous creepy-crawlies than you can ‘poke a stick at’ (but please don’t!), the oldest living culture in the world, and a complex history. So, here are my recommendations for novels that travel deep into the Australian spirit.
First published in 1894, this is definitely a nostalgic choice; however, there’s a good reason why it became the first Australian novel to be continuously in print for 100 years in 1994. Esther Turner’s classic novel is Australia’s answer to Little Women, and if you don’t fall in love with the seven boisterous Woolcot children and end up in tears over the tragic events at Yarrahappini, I’m afraid you’re even harder-hearted than Captain Woolcot himself!
This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
I’m a Pom, as Aussies would say, born and bred in England to an Australian mother and British father. I emigrated to Australia as a ten-pound Pom way back when and though I eventually came home again I’ve always retained an affection and a curiosity about the country, which in time led me to write three books about my own family history there. The early days of colonial Australia, when around 1400 people, half of whom were convicts, ventured across the world to found a penal colony in a country they knew almost nothing about, is one of the most fascinating and frankly unlikely stories you could ever hope to come across.
A bold and broad-sweeping book, written in the 1940s, described as a novel but featuring a mix of real and fictional characters, The Timeless Land is a beautifully imaginative telling of the arrival of the First Fleet in what became Sydney in 1788, as seen through the eyes of the Aboriginal people, the Governor and his officers, convicts and the odd settler. The depiction of the part-real, part-invented Aboriginal people may cause raised eyebrows nowadays, but the book is based on thorough research and written with great imagination and sensitivity. I love the mix of the real and the imaginary, while never distorting the facts. It’s a brilliant way to paint a vivid portrait of a subject, I’ve done it myself (if I may be presumptuous enough to bracket myself with Ms. Dark).
An outstanding literary achievement, meticulously researched and deeply felt, this portrait of the earliest days of the European settlement of Australia remains unrivalled. the year 1788: the very beginning of European settlement. these were times of hardship, cruelty and danger. Above all, they were times of conflict between the Aborigines and the white settlers. Eleanor Dark brings alive those bitter years with moments of tenderness and conciliation amid the brutality and hostility. the cast of characters includes figures historical and fictional, black and white, convict and settler. All the while, beneath the veneer of British civilisation, lies the baffling presence…
I’m an Australian crime writer and I love reading crime with a real sense of place and/or time. Growing up in Australia, most of the time I read international authors, so finding fabulous books by local authors was a thrill every time, and that excitement has never left me. This list crosses the genre from cosy to hard-boiled crime, which hopefully means something for everyone. If nothing here grabs you, there’s a lot more fantastic Australian crime fiction to discover (did you know Australian author Charlotte Jay won the first ever Edgar Award in 1954?) and I can passion-talk about it anytime!
Corris and his protagonist, the hard-scrabble private detective Cliff Hardy, are quintessentially Australian. The Dying Trade introduces Cliff (smoker, drinker, ex-boxer) and sets the standard for all the books that follow in this series. It’s dry and laconic, with a wonderful sense of place (a very gritty 1980s Sydney). There’s a definite nod to the greats— Chandler and Hammett in this series; you know Cliff Hardy probably shouldn’t take this job, it’s odds-on he’ll cop a beating along the way, possible he’ll find love and lose it again. I enjoy the author’s economy with words and the moral complexity of his characters. If you like hard-boiled crime, this series is worth a look!
*Note: Sydney is much nicer than it may seem when you walk in Corris’s shoes!
Meet Cliff Hardy. Smoker, drinker, ex-boxer. And private investigator.
The Dying Trade not only introduces a sleuth who has become an enduring Australian literary legend—the antihero of thirty-seven thrillers—but it is also a long love letter to the seamy side of Sydney itself.
