“Just now I’m walking across Europe. It’s the 1930s and I’m in Hungary, in the company of Patrick Leigh Fermor.
“At 18, and after being expelled from school, he decided—as you do—to walk from The Netherlands to Istanbul. Between the Woods and the Water is the second volume in the trilogy begun in A Time of Gifts and concluded in The Broken Road (the latter with the collaboration of Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, who completed the book after Leigh Fermor’s death).
“This is wonderfully vivid writing; and he’s describing a continent on the brink of enormous upheaval and permanent change, so it’s of real historical and social interest too. He has a great gift for bringing a description to life and, with recourse to the notebooks he kept on the journey, he animates the text with conversations he had with some of the extraordinary people he met along the way.
“Highly recommended!”
— Elaine