A Time of Gifts

This first volume of a walking memoir follows the eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor as he leaves London and sets out on foot from the Hook of Holland toward Constantinople. The narrative covers the Low Countries, the Rhine and the Danube, German cities and Austrian castles, and Slovakia, ending as he reaches the Hungarian border. He records landscape, inns, chance hospitality, languages, and architecture, and the political weather of the early 1930s, including the rise of National Socialism. The book is a reconstruction, written decades later, of a youth's overland passage through a Europe still traversable on foot.

Bound in pale blue cloth cover blocked with a dark green, silver and gold design. Green slipcase.