THE FOLIO SOCIETY

It was 1933, the year that Hitler came to power in Germany. Armed with a borrowed sleeping bag, a battered Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace, Fermor set out looking for a new life, freedom, 'something to write about'. Sleeping in doss-houses, barns and castles, tramping across landscapes straight out of Grimms' fairytales, between castled hills and walled cities, Fermor discovers a Europe almost medieval in atmosphere. His wanderings take him through a hundred adventures from mistakenly straying into a room full of SS officers to being arrested at gunpoint in Hungary, suspected of being the notorious smuggler Black Joseph. Brimming with history, romance and erudition, A Time of Gifts beautifully evokes the spirit of a continent on the brink.

'Amongst travel writers Patrick Leigh Fermor is king of the cats! His enthralling pair of books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water are like prisms. Turn them one way and see a young student's verve and cultural hunger; another, and share his older self's warm company and wise understanding. Turn them a third time and relish - more than that, be intoxicated by - Leigh Fermor's utterly joyous way with language. Pilgrim, turn them once more! Set out on foot through pre-war Europe on a magical, now-and-never-again journey.' Kevin Crossley-Holland.