My travel book is nearly finished. A combination of travel writing interspersed with history and culture about the places I’ve been to in Central Europe. I received feedback from test readers that they liked the historical info I gave in footnotes to contextualise various things, but they wished there was more of them, as a lot of the info was never covered at school, so I rewrote the essays to incorporate accessible historical context into the main text. You will finally know the answer to the Schleswig-Holstein question.They also liked the music, film and book recommendations and wanted more. Some of the sections were also getting longer and more unwieldy than I would have liked, so I split them off. The result is a total of 18 essays, including an extra one about Kraftwerk and added section about Südtirol.

Pre-orders would be much appreciated, and you will get your name in the thanks. Paperbacks are £13.
Estimated printing date end of April.

Mitteleuropa

280 page illustrated paperback book of 18 travel writing essays about Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary + 48 page colour photo booklet.

Standard paperback size. Out April 2025.
Ebook version will be emailed out to pre-orders.

Austria 

Wiener Blut 

Habsburgs, The Cold War, Freud, Schiele, Hundertwasser, art school (and why they rejected Hitler) Stefan Zweig and Falco

Carnival and Sautanz

Small town carnivals, Burgenland: the Kansas of Austria, Krampus, and Austria’s Catholic Fascism era pre-Anschluss

Real Life Zelda 

Caves, salt mines, herbs, the platonic idea of the Austrian pub, quests and bad home-made taxidermy

Alpenmilch

The Alps, chocolate factories, South Tyrol and hearing the Last Unicorn theme tune play in the supermarket in Graz

Czechia & Slovakia

Kafka Himself 

The OG Sad Boi, a small circle of Prague, Czech punk, and literary eating

Puppets of Prague

Stop motion animation, black light theatre, Jan Švankmajer, Jiři Trunka, Zdeněk Miler and why you should beware of potatoes in the cellar

Xanadu

Bratislava, the Cold War secrets of the Big Tesco, halls of mirrors, and mirages on the horizon

Germany 

The Proud Republic of the Swamp

The North: Dittmarschen: no masters, no leaders, no kings, no hills, Otto Waalkes and the Ottiphants, field recordings in swamps and canals, salmiakki and genuine soil samples from Wacken metal fest.

Kling Klang

The West: Kraftwerk, Can, the Rheinland and Baader-Meinhof gang, why Bielefeld doesn’t exist and a disastrous trip to Documenta 14

Prussian Pigs

The former: the rise of Prussia, the Baltic coast and Prora resort, Loriot, Gdansk and Kaliningrad.

Lignite 

The East: Cheap nasty coal, life in the former DDR, the Stasi, 1980s Dresden, Ostalgia, the former Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt, Berlin in the 2000s, and modern day Magdeburg and Schöningen

Under the Weißwurst Equator

The south: Ludwig II of Bavaria and his addiction to building baroque palaces, Munich, Passau, Kaspar Hauser, Gunter Grass, Michael Ende and the Neverending Story

Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Goethe and Faust, visiting Dachau and Mauthausen, and Primo Levi. East and West Germany and Austria’s attempts (or lack of them) to come to terms with the Nazi era and Holocaust.

Hungary 

The Versailles of Hungary

The mirror-world of the Austria-Hungary border, how the Hungarian language works, discount dentists and Viktor Orbán.

Like Petőfi in the Fog

Poets and revolutionaries, the 1848 revolution, and listening to Leonard Cohen in Budapest.

Terrorháza

Hungarian fascism, the 1956 Revolution and Khrushchev’s reaction, and touring the former secret police headquarters with the world’s most annoying American Army Dad

Goulash Communism & New Wave

Working in Budapest in the late 2000s, 70s and 80s Hungary, Hungarian New Wave music, and being trapped on a 80s Hungarian Pop karaoke party on a boat on the Danube

Liechtenstein

Central Europe’s premiere microstate, full of money laundering, €5 crisps, modern art, Balzers castle and seeing the entire country via the no 11 bus.