Cycling Home from Siberia is a gripping story of endurance and adventure: Rob Lilwall's epic journey back to England via the forbidding jungles of Papua New Guinea, an Australian cyclone, and Afghanistan's war-torn Hindu Kush.

"It is late October, and the temperature is already -40 degrees . . . My thoughts are filled with frozen rivers that may or may not hold my weight; empty, forgotten valleys haunted by emaciated ghosts; and packs of ravenous, merciless wolves."

Having left his job as a high-school geography teacher, Rob Lilwall arrived in Siberia equipped only with...