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Time of Gifts

Patrick Leigh Fermor
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A01=Patrick Leigh Fermor
architecture
Author_Patrick Leigh Fermor
Category=WTL
Constantinople
Danube
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_travel
Europe
forthcoming
Holland
Hungary
John Craxton
nature
travel writing
walking memoir

Product details

  • ISBN 9781399836852
  • Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 16 Jul 2026
  • Publisher: John Murray Press
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

WITH A FOREWORD BY JAN MORRIS

'A treasure chest' Spectator

'A masterpiece' William Dalrymple, Financial Times

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. Alone, carrying only a rucksack and a small allowance, he travelled through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary.

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

'Rightly considered to be among the most beautiful travel books in the language' Independent
About Patrick Leigh Fermor
In December 1933, at the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) walked across Europe, reaching Constantinople in early 1935. He travelled on into Greece, where in Athens he met Balasha Cantacuzene, with whom he lived - mostly in Rumania - until the outbreak of war. Serving in occupied Crete, he led a successful operation to kidnap a German general, for which he won the DSO and was once described by the BBC as 'a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene'. After the war he began writing, and travelled extensively round Greece with Joan Eyres Monsell whom he later married. Towards the end of his life he wrote the first two books about his early trans-European odyssey, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He planned a third, unfinished at the time of his death in 2011, which has since been edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper and published as The Broken Road.

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