Sunday Telegraph Humour Book of the Year

Hilarious - Daily Mail

A hilarious and invaluable insight for gap-year travellers into what to avoid out there.

The email home is an essential part of every gap-year traveller's journey. Where once the news of narrowly surviving a bus crash on the dirt-roads of India, waking up to gunfire in Honduras or fending off marriage proposals from complete strangers would have made it home only on the back of a slow-moving battered postcard, these days those tantalizing details and terrible mistakes are now recorded immediately and distributed liberally for every friend and family member to wince at.

In Don't Tell Mum, Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk have collected together the funniest, most surreal, most alarming gap-year emails into a treasure-trove of correspondence. Accompanied by their wicked commentary, Don't Tell Mum gives the aspiring traveller the low-down on what not to do when trotting the globe.

Hilarious * Daily Mail *
I would love to do a gap year so I could contribute to this hilarious and terrifying book -- Sandi Toksvig

Simon Hoggart (1946-2014) was the parliamentary sketch-writer and diarist for the Guardian. He also wrote about wine and TV for the Spectator and was the host of Radio 4's News Quiz. Atlantic Books published Don't Tell Mum: Hair-Raising Messages Home from Gap-Year Travellers in 2006 and The Christmas Letters in 2007. His collection of parliamentary sketches covering the Blair era, The Hands of History, was published in 2007.

Emily Monk completed her gap-year in 2006. She continues to enjoy travelling the world.