Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Fermor's Books

This is a unbelievably beautiful book! I had found the second volume in a thrift store and was captivated by the cover art and the buzz I found. I asked for the other two volumes for Christmas. Ranks up there with Turgenev's "A Sportman's Journal" and John Muir's "Yosemite"
At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.[8] He set off on 8 December 1933, less than a year after Hitler had come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way. Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), were about this journey. A book on the final part of his journey was unfinished at the time of Leigh Fermor's death, but was published as The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos in September 2013 by John Murray. The book draws on Leigh Fermor's diary at the time and on an early draft he wrote in the 1960s

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