Paperback
Details: condition: brand new format: paperback isbn: 9781529369526 publisher: john murray press overview: a time of gifts is patrick leigh fermor's celebrated travel memoir recounting his 1933 walk from the hook of holland toward constantinople, aged just eighteen. Told decades later with dazzling recall, it captures a europe on the brink of catastrophe, seen through the eyes of a penniless, curious young wanderer. Rich in landscape, language and encounter, it remains one of the twentieth century's most admired works of travel writing. About the book: setting out with little more than a rucksack and a few pounds, fermor traces a route through holland, up the rhine, across germany, down the danube and on through austria and czechoslovakia towards hungary. Sleeping in barns one night and in the castles of impoverished central european aristocracy the next, the young traveller records with equal delight the kindness of peasants and the fading grandeur of a vanishing world. His journey becomes a portrait of europe's deep cultural roots just as they were about to be shattered by war, threaded through with digressions on art, architecture, history and language that reveal an extraordinary breadth of learning. First published in 1977, decades after the walk took place, the book benefits from a lifetime's reflection, giving it a layered, elegiac quality alongside its youthful exuberance. It is widely regarded as the first volume of a trilogy continuing the story of fe...
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