From his home in southern France comes award-winning travel writer and journalist Robert Camuto. Here a few years ago with Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country, he ventures eastward in the Mediterranean for his newest, Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey (University of Nebraska Press). "Thank goodness the publisher sent me an advance copy so I can get to Camuto's Sicily before everyone else. Here are the sights and sounds, the smells and tastes, and plenty of hopes and fears from what sounds like an island paradise." - Kermit Lynch. "Robert is brilliant, witty, and thorough in describing the true characters of Sicilian wine today, uncovering the very human and heartwarming side to making wine in a wine paradise ... Bravo!" - Shelley Lindgren.

A most welcome Elliott Bay return is made by Geoffrey Wolff, for whom Seattle was, in adolescence, home. A masterful writer in both non-fiction (read his autobiographical The Duke of Deception for an account of that Seattle adolescence) and fiction, he is here with a captivating biographical account, The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum (Knopf). "Hugely entertaining and informative. In an era of teenage sailors routinely circumnavigating the world within a safety net of satellite phones, GPS navigation, emergency call beacons and corporate sponsorship, Wolff skillfully illuminates, celebrates, and further burnishes the eccentric life and legacy of Joshua Slocum—master of tall ships and The North Star of solo travelers." - Eric Hansen. "As one would expect from Geoffrey Wolff, The Hard Way Around is an engrossing and energetically written life of a very tricky and complex character. Slocum has at last met, in the author of The Duke of Deception, the biographer he has long deserved." - Jonathan Raban.