The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through The Caribbean Islands

Travellers Tree

Leigh, Fermor Patrick

Literature & Fiction

Penguin Uk

Originally published in 1953, this novel was immediately hailed as a rare sweep of color across the drab post-war years. Fermor's writing about this tropical island is as beautiful and haunting as the sound of the violins rising from the water, which is all that remains of the island and its inhabitants.

The Violins of Saint Jacques (Twentieth Century Classics)

WINCHESTER, Simon

Oxford University Press

In spring 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire - youngest of the six legendary Mitford sisters - invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, the Devonshires' house in Ireland. This halcyon visit sparked off a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange of sporadic but highly entertaining letters.
There can rarely have been such contrasting styles: Debo, unashamed philistine and self-professed illiterate (though suspected by her friends of being a secret reader), darts from subject to subject while Paddy, polyglot, widely read prose virtuoso, replies in the fluent, polished manner that has earned him recognition as one of the finest writers in the English language.
Prose notwithstanding, the two friends have much in common: a huge enjoyment of life, youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity and lack of malice. There are glimpses of President Kennedy's inauguration, weekends at Sandringham, stag hunting in France, filming with Errol Flynn in French Equatorial Africa and, above all, of life at Chatsworth, the great house that Debo spent much of her life restoring, and of Paddy in the house that he and his wife Joan designed and built on the southernmost peninsula of Greece.

In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor

Essays & Correspondence

John Murray

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

'Nothing short of a masterpiece' JAN MORRIS\n'[This] gloriously ornate account of that epic journey is a classic' ROBERT MACFARLANE\n'Not only is this journey one of physical adventure but of cultural awakening. Architecture, art, genealogy, quirks of history and language are all devoured -- and here passed on -- with a gusto uniquely his' COLIN THUBRON, Sunday Times\n'One of the most romantic books of the twentieth century, Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of a long walk across Europe is also a literary treasure, a rich blend of action and observation' Guardian\nIn 1933, at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on an extraordinary journey by foot - from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and takes the reader with him as far as Hungary.\nIt is a book of compelling glimpses - not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable burgomasters who welcomed him, and that world's grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic.

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

Travel

Europe

'A book so good you'll resent finishing it' Sunday Times\n'The finest travelling companion we could ever have' Evening Standard\n'Rightly considered to be among the most beautiful travel books in the language' Independent\nINTRODUCED BY JAN MORRIS\nThe acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey -- as an 18-year-old -- across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary.\nPicking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania.\nThe trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's account also provides a coherent understanding of the dramatic events then unfolding in Middle Europe. But the delight remains in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges.

Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

'Magnificent . . . The prose has the glorious turbulence and boil of the first two books, and the youthful magic of his 'dream-odyssey' ROBERT MACFARLANE, The Times\n'Vivid . . . full of fun, kindness, easy learning, sophistication and innocence . . . a gently fitting conclusion to his tumultuous masterpiece' JAN MORRIS, Mail on Sunday\n'A major work . . . one of the masterpieces of the genre, indeed one of the masterworks of post-war English non-fiction' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, Guardian\n'Filled with brilliant evocations of [Patrick Leigh Fermor's] life on the road . . . essential reading' The Economist\nA Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water were the first two volumes in a projected trilogy that would describe the walk that Patrick Leigh Fermor undertook at the age of eighteen from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. 'When are you going to finish Vol. III?' was the cry from his fans; but although he wished he could, the words refused to come. The curious thing was that he had not only written an early draft of the last part of the walk, but that it predated the other two. It remains unfinished but The Broken Road - edited and introduced by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper - completes an extraordinary journey.

The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos

Travel Writing

Get lost in northern Greece with one of the greatest travel writers of the 20th century as he travels to monasteries, among shepherds, and throughout the hills, mountains, and rugged coastline of this enchanted land. Roumeli is not to be found on present-day maps. It is the name once given to northern Greece—stretching from the Bosporus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth, a name that evokes a world where the present is inseparably bound up with the past. Roumeli describes Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wanderings in and around this mysterious and yet very real region. He takes us with him among Sarakatsan shepherds, to the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, and on a mission to track down a pair of Byron’s slippers at Missolonghi. As he does, he brings to light the inherent conflicts of the Greek inheritance—the tenuous links to the classical and Byzantine heritage, the legacy of Ottoman domination—along with an underlying, even older world, traces of which Leigh Fermor finds in the hills and mountains and along stretches of barely explored coast. Roumeli is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese.

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (New York Review Books Classics)

NYRB Classics

Join a classic adventurer on his travels throughout southern Greece, where he explores remote villages, swims in the Aegean and Ionian seas, and finds history wherever he goes. The Mani, at the tip of Greece’s—and Europe’s—southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people’s daily lives. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has been described as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene,” bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century. Here, in the book that confirmed his reputation as one of the English language’s finest writers of prose, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history and time-honored lore. Mani is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s celebrated Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece.

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York Review Books Classics)

While still a teenager, Patrick Leigh Fermor made his way across Europe, as recounted in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. During World War II, he fought with local partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Crete. But in A Time to Keep Silence, Leigh Fermor writes about a more inward journey, describing his several sojourns in some of Europe’s oldest and most venerable monasteries. He stays at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, a great repository of art and learning; at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant; and at the deeply ascetic Trappist monastery of La Grande Trappe, where monks take a vow of silence. Finally, he visits the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, hewn from the stony spires of a moonlike landscape, where he seeks some trace of the life of the earliest Christian anchorites. More than a history or travel journal, however, this beautiful short book is a meditation on the meaning of silence and solitude for modern life. Leigh Fermor writes, “In the seclusion of a cell—an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual, and long solitary walks in the woods—the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.”

A Time to Keep Silence (New York Review Books Classics)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Alternative Medicine

In the late 1940s Patrick Leigh Fermor, now widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest travel writers, set out to explore the then relatively little-visited islands of the Caribbean. Rather than a comprehensive political or historical study of the region, The Traveller’s Tree, Leigh Fermor’s first book, gives us his own vivid, idiosyncratic impressions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti, among other islands. Here we watch Leigh Fermor walk the dusty roads of the countryside and the broad avenues of former colonial capitals, equally at home among the peasant and the elite, the laborer and the artist. He listens to steel drum bands, delights in the Congo dancing that closes out Havana’s Carnival, and observes vodou and Rastafarian rites, all with the generous curiosity and easy erudition that readers will recognize from his subsequent classic accounts A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands (New York Review Books Classics)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

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Books by Leigh, Fermor Patrick