The greatest travel book of the twentieth century — in the handsome new John Murray Classics edition, with a foreword by Jan Morris.
In December 1933, at eighteen years old — expelled from school, brimming with poetry — Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople with a rucksack, a few pounds, and The Oxford Book of English Verse. This first volume carries him up the Rhine and down the Danube: through a Germany on the eve of darkness, snowbound castles and baroque libraries, barns and ballrooms, monasteries and country houses — welcomed everywhere, noticing everything.
Written decades later with the full glory of his mature style, A Time of Gifts is at once a young man's adventure and an elegy for a Europe about to vanish. Sentence for sentence, it may be the most beautiful prose in the language of travel.
This edition
- John Murray Classics series livery
- Foreword by Jan Morris
- First of the great trilogy — continued in Between the Woods and the Water
Perfect for readers of
Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin, William Dalrymple — and every traveller who has dreamed of simply setting out.
About the author
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) — traveller, war hero (he kidnapped a German general on occupied Crete), and by common consent one of the finest prose stylists of his century.
