Publisher edition artwork
A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor · First published 1977
An eighteen-year-old walks from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933. This is the first leg.
Essential
Moderate — the vocabulary is a workout · Medium — around 320 pages
Why Read It?
The high-water mark of travel writing, and the best argument ever made for going slowly.
What It's About
The first volume of Leigh Fermor's account of walking across 1930s Europe, from Rotterdam to the middle Danube.
Why It Matters
It preserved a Central Europe that the war erased, and set a standard of erudition and generosity that the genre has not matched.
The Review
Leigh Fermor set out with a rucksack, a volume of Horace and almost no money, sleeping in barns one night and in Bavarian schlosses the next, and wrote it up four decades later from memory and a recovered notebook. The prose is the most extravagant in English travel writing and entirely earned — digressions on heraldry, monastic architecture and the Danube's fish arrive without apology.
He is also walking across a Europe that is about to be destroyed, and knows it while writing though not while walking. That double vision is what makes it more than a young man's adventure.
Best Read
Before a European journey — ideally one taken by train or on foot.
Three Things You'll Take From It
- 01
Curiosity opens more doors than money.
- 02
Slow travel is not a lifestyle choice; it is the only kind that produces memory.
- 03
Write things down at the time. He nearly could not.
Better Read or Heard?
Crispin Redman's reading is excellent, though the prose density rewards print.
If You Like This…
Between the Woods and the Water — Patrick Leigh Fermor
The second leg.
Find it on AmazonThe Road to Oxiana — Robert Byron
Drier, funnier, further east.
Find it on Amazon
The Edition to Own
The New York Review Books Classics edition has the best maps and introduction; the Folio Society set is the handsome one.
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