‘[This] gloriously ornate account of that epic journey is a classic’ ROBERT MACFARLANE

‘The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic.’

In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his ‘great trudge’, a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Three decades later he wrote A Time of Gifts, the sparklingly original account of the first part of this youthful adventure, which took him through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary.

Alone, carrying only a rucksack and with a small allowance of only a pound a week, Fermor had planned to sleep rough – to live ‘like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar’ – but a chance introduction in Bavaria led to comfortable stays in castles, and provided a glimpse of the old Europe of princes and peasants.

Hailed as a masterpiece, A Time of Gifts is in part a coming-of-age memoir, but it is also a rich and compelling portrait of a continent that – despite its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers and grand cities – was soon to be swept away by war, modernisation and profound social change.

‘Not only is this journey one of physical adventure but of cultural awakening. Architecture, art, genealogy, quirks of history and language are all devoured — and here passed on — with a gusto uniquely his’ COLIN THUBRON, SUNDAY TIMES

‘One of the most romantic books of the twentieth century, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of a long walk across Europe is also a literary treasure, a rich blend of action and observation’ GUARDIAN

The expedition was led by a writer and poet and the party included a Swiss international skier and jeweller, a social anthropologist from Provence and a Nottinghamshire farming squire – all seasoned mountaineers. The other two participants – the author himself and a botany-loving duke – were complete novices. As the group travelled from Lima into increasingly remote parts of the country, Leigh Fermor captured their experiences in a series of letters to his wife.

Whether recounting the thrill of crossing a glacier, the rigours of campsite life under a blanket of snow, their lively encounters with locals or the strangely moving sight of a lone condor circling in the sky, the author vividly conveys the excitement of discovery and the intense uniqueness of the land.

Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece – south of ancient Sparta – is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa.

Leigh Fermor’s hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic – together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.

Roumeli is not on modern maps: it is the ancient name for the lands from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth. But it is the perfect, evocative name for the Greece that Fermor captures in writing that carries throughout his trademark vividness of description. But what is more, the pictures of people, traditions and landscapes that he creates on the page are imbued with an intimate understanding of Greece and its history.

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.

The concluding part of the trilogy was published in September 2013 as The Broken Road.

It is a book of compelling glimpses – not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable burgomasters who welcomed him, and that world’s grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic.