Mani, English edition

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.

An extraordinary book of adventure and encounter, fantasy and learning, observation and experience Sunday Times From the Mani he has brought back riches. How can one do justice to the fascination and poetry of this book, its generosity and its learning - its love? Spectator He supercharges his narrative with a combination of tenderness and high spirits appropriate to his past achievements as a guerrilla leader in Crete Daily Telegraph Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century Financial Times John Murray is doing the decent thing and reissuing all of Leigh Fermor's main books ... But what else would you expect from a publisher whose commitment to geography is such that for more than two centuries it has widened our understanding of the world? Geographical Magazine Bringing the landscape alive as no other writer can, he uses his profound and eclectic understanding of cultures and peoples ... to paint vivid pictures - nobody has illuminated the geography of Europe better Geographical Magazine 'Extraordinarily engaging ... thanks to Leigh Fermor's ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase ... a compelling story' London Review of Books