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Access All Areas
Access All Areas
Nov 4, 2025 10:26 AM

Author:Sara Wheeler

Access All Areas

In a series of remarkable books - Travels in a Thin Country, Terra Incognita, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry Garrard, Too Close to the Sun and The Magnetic North - Sara Wheeler has shown that she is not only one of the finest travel writers of her generation but a very fine biographer too. Published to coincide with her fiftieth birthday, Access All Areas gathers together a selection of her shorter pieces, both journalism and introductions to other books.

As one would expect, the frozen poles of the earth feature often, whether she is spending the night in Captain Scott's hut or reliving the adventures of Shackleton and Nansen. But its hot places feature too - Malawi, Kerala, Cuba and Bangladesh. She writes brilliantly of her heroes - Mary Kingsley, Fanny Trollope, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris and Sybille Bedford - and about the pains and pleasures of writing biography. Worried that having her children would end her roaming, she took her children with her, to the Arctic, and on a brilliantly depicted cruise on the QE2. She learns to bellydance, to strip, and to walk on the wing of a biplane at 3000 feet.

This is an immensely varied and satisfying collection.

Reviews

Comic, tragic, erotic and elegiac. His finest work

—— Mail on Sunday

Touching and comic... Magical

—— Scotsman

A poetic novel of love, family and loss... A work so exquisitely written, so diamond-clear, that critics are already hailing it as Oz's finest work... A writer of revelatory genius

—— Guardian

Beautiful and profoundly wise. Very few works of fiction are written with such economy, simplicity and precision that a reviewer simply wants to quote from them... The Same Sea is such a book. Amos Oz has created an unforgettable work of art

—— Daily Telegraph

A cleansing, poetic, meditative and moving novel

—— Herald

By turns lyrical and earthy, Amos Oz's The Same Sea dances its way through the entanglements of its characters, deftly catching each voice

—— Esquire

Short and exquisite... An extraordinary book unlike any he has written. It is a banquet in miniature

—— Evening Standard

Full of nostalgia and gentleness as well as being sharply observant

—— Stylist

Chingonyi’s poems are full of questions that need asking. His gift is for pushing poems further than you expected them to go. [A] striking quest of a debut

—— Poetry Book of the Month, Kate Kellaway , Observer

Powerful… These poems are essential and urgent and shine a light on British culture in an unique and spellbinding way

—— Elle, ‘10 'Woke' Works Of Literature You Need To Add To Your Reading List This Year’

Kumakanda is an essential collection from one of the UK's most exciting poets. Kayo's poetry is beautiful, thoughtful, musical and nostalgic

—— Nikesh Shukla

A wonderful debut: music, race, deracination, love and death are all woven into a compelling portrait of a young man growing up, rendered in poems that are elegant yet conversational, fluent yet profoundly skillful, touched with heart-stopping lyricism. For the reader, an initiation not to be missed

—— Henry Shukman

When James Baldwin described the writer's goal as stringing together sentences that were as clean as a bone, he wasn't to know that poet Kayo Chingonyi's debut collection Kumukanda would achieve exactly that

—— Rianna Jade Parker , Vice UK

The title poem Kumukanda is elegant, eloquent and moving... For all the particularity of his subject matters and his openness in exploring them, it’s the fine and sophisticated writing that makes me return to these poems

—— Jane Routh , Magma Poetry

Exceedingly powerful; by turns furious, tender and bittersweet, taking as it does the overall theme of in-betweens. Ancestry versus contemporary rites of passage. The ambiguous versus the undeniable. Who you are, and who you choose to be seen as, versus who others perceive you to be

—— Clare Mulley , Skinny

Chingonyi is the living writer who inspires and influences me the most

—— Derek Owusu , Big Issue

A beautiful exploration of grief and boyhood... Each poem is delivered with such precision and deftness

—— Evening Standard

Underground Airlines is a powerful work … a brave, controversial thriller.

—— Crime Fiction Lover

A great premise … but slavery scenes will haunt you.

—— WEstern Daily Press

An almost painfully timely novel.

—— Sci-Fi Now

Winters does an amazing job of painting a world that never was but, in his hands, is frighteningly plausible … Winters has crafted a thrilling, tightly plotted and nourish thriller.

—— Independent

If you’re looking for a brilliant, smart, chilling page turner for what’s left of the summer, I can recommend Ben H. Winters.

—— Daily Mirror

Winters does an amazing job of painting a world that next we was, but in his hands, are frighteningly plausible … Winters could not have written a more timely novel.

—— Belfast Telegraph

Groundbreaking.

—— Pride Magazine

A really intriguing premise.

—— Anna's Reading List

On the surface, Underground Airlines is a well-crafted thriller, suspenseful and with fascinating characters. But not far below the surface is a philosophical debate about how one small change of events in history can put the world on a different path.

—— Mystery People

‘Intriguing’

—— SFX

There is more than one idiot in this delightful and slyly funny coming-of-age novel... Will strike a chord for any former fresher who felt the same way. (That would be all of us.)

—— Sarra Manning , Red

Batuman, in seemingly writing a novel about nothing, has produced an incredibly complex, accurate and funny novel.

—— Rachael Revesz , Independent

I never want to finish it, so I’m reading it very slowly.

—— Lauren Waterman , ELLE

Every page is thicketed with jokes, riffs, theories of language. It’s a portrait of an intellectual and sentimental education that offers almost unseemly pleasure.

—— Parhul Sehgal , New York Times

Elif Batuman is a real writer, and should be allowed to write whatever the hell she likes.

—— Daniel Soar , London Review of Books

Selin’s deadpan narration is often very funny indeed

—— Leaf Arbuthnot , Sunday Times

This is a capacious book that creates an alternative world

—— Lara Feigel , Guardian

At once clever and clueless, Batuman’s heroine shows us with just how messy it can be to forge a self

—— London Property South

One of the best novels I read all summer... a painstakingly accurate depiction of the balancing act that is student-life. As clever as it is funny, Batuman's debut novel allows us to laugh at our own stupidity, and celebrate our own cluelessness.

—— Varsity

The Idiot... manages the trick of being laugh-out-loud funny while not actually being a comedy. It just observers life, in all its truth and is hilarious for page after page.

—— Patrick Ness , Guardian

I finally read The Idiot by Elif Batuman and everyone is correct, she is clearly a genius

—— White Review, *Books of the Year*
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