Beryl Markham · 1942 · global

Beryl Markham's 1942 memoir: a childhood in colonial Kenya, a career training racehorses and flying the African bush, and the flight that made her famous - solo from England to Nova Scotia in September 1936, east to west against the prevailing winds. Hemingway called it a bloody wonderful book and said she could write rings round him.

1. 1
   Nairobi

   Raised on her father's farm in British East Africa, Markham trains racehorses and then becomes one of Africa's first bush pilots - flying mail, passengers and elephant-spotting runs for hunters over country with no landing grounds.

2. 2
   Abingdon

   She takes off from the Oxfordshire airfield on 4 September 1936 in a Percival Vega Gull called The Messenger, loaded with fuel and good-luck gifts, aiming for New York against a forty-mile headwind.

3. 3
   Baleine Cove

   Twenty-one hours later, with ice choking the fuel-tank vents and the engine starved, she puts down nose-first in a peat bog on Cape Breton - and climbs out with a gash on her forehead into a village of about twenty people.