The Last Voyage: To India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam

In the age of steamships and colonial expansion, Annie Brassey and her family circumnavigated the globe aboard their luxurious yacht, the Sunbeam. This is no stuffy Victorian travelogue: Brassey writes with the infectious enthusiasm of a child seeing the world for the first time, her prose as changeable as the climates she traverses. She shivers through Japanese winters, swelters under the Arabian sun, loses her breakfast to the violent rollers of the Straits of Magellan, and boldly leads her children to the rim of an active Hawaiian volcano. The book pulses with what the Victorians called 'grand tour' wonder, but filtered through a mother's intimate journal: the logistics of keeping five children entertained across three years, the small dramas of shipboard life, the parade of local dignitaries and exotic locales. It is a portal to a vanished world of sail, when the edges of the map were still lined with possibility and a well-connected family could drift from Tahiti to Bombay to Melbourne in comfortable obscurity.