Trieste

Foreword by Robert Macfarlane: 'A magnificent feat'

Jan Morris - then James - first visited Trieste as a young soldier at the end of the Second World War. She was beguiled by its hallucinatory magic; its wistful melancholy; its enigmatic changeability.

Half a century later, this unique city on the Adriatic became a symbol of her own life, with all its hopes, loves and disappointments. Whether meandering along the waterfront or experiencing the street life, her musings on an eclectic range of subjects - cities, seas, cats, exile, sex, empires, civility and kindness - are inspired by the presence of Trieste, and recorded in or between the lines of her meditative tribute.

Evoking its rich layers of history, from its rise to wealth and fame under the Habsburgs, through years of Fascist rule to the Cold War - starring famous visitors from James Joyce to Sigmund Freud - Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is neither a history nor a travel book: like the place, and the author, it is truly one of a kind.

'Among the finest descriptive writers who has ever lived . . . An ineffable talent' Sara Wheeler