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'An old-fashioned adventure' Wall Street Journal

FINALIST FOR THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK AWARD

In 1933, the eighteen year old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out in a pair of hobnailed boots to chance and charm his way across Europe, 'like a tramp, a pilgrim or a wandering scholar'. The books he later wrote about this walk are journeys through cultures now extinct, landscapes irrevocably altered by the twentieth century.

As a young man, Nick Hunt read A Time of Gifts and dreamed of following in Fermor's footsteps. Using Paddy's books as his only travel guide, he began his own 'great trudge' - on foot all the way to Istanbul, trekking some 2, 500 miles across Europe through eight countries, following two major rivers and crossing three mountain ranges.

His aim? To slow down and linger in a world where we pass by so much, so fast. To discover for himself what remained of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, the mysterious, the deeper currents of myth and story that still flow beneath Europe's surface.

'A moving and profoundly honest book. How touched and fascinated [Fermor] would have been to read it' Artemis Cooper

'Vivid and hard-won' Giles Foden