Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor
List: $31.99 | Sale: $22.40
Club: $15.99

Between the Woods and the Water
On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor

Narrator: Crispin Redman

Unabridged: 10 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: John Murray

Published: 06/26/2014


Synopsis

The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary.

Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania.

The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's account also provides a coherent understanding of the dramatic events then unfolding in Middle Europe. But the delight remains in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges.

(P)2014 John Murray Press

About Patrick Leigh Fermor

In December 1933, at the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) walked across Europe, reaching Constantinople in early 1935. He travelled on into Greece, where in Athens he met Balasha Cantacuzene, with whom he lived - mostly in Rumania - until the outbreak of war. Serving in occupied Crete, he led a successful operation to kidnap a German general, for which he won the DSO and was once described by the BBC as 'a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene'. After the war he began writing, and travelled extensively round Greece with Joan Eyres Monsell whom he later married. Towards the end of his life he wrote the first two books about his early trans-European odyssey, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He planned a third, unfinished at the time of his death in 2011, which has since been edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper and published as The Broken Road.


Reviews

This book and its predecessor, A Time of Gifts—and its successor, The Broken Road, which I've yet to read—are about a walking tour the author took at nineteen years of age along the Danube in late 1934 and 1935. In A Time of Gifts he travels on foot from London—he hops a steamer across the channel—t......more


Awards

  • Thomas Cook Travel Awards