"Nick Hunt has written a glorious book, rich with insight and wit, about walking his way both across and into contemporary Europe. . . . So many memorable encounters with people and places! A book about gifts, modernity, endurance and landscape, it represents a fine addition to the literature of the leg."--Robert Macfarlane, award-winning travel writer, author of "The Wild Places" and "The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot"
"This moving and profoundly honest book sometimes brings a sense of unlimited freedom, sometimes joy, sometimes an extraordinary, dream-like dislocation: always accompanied by a dazzling sharpness of hearing and vision. I see now how that youthful walk informed so much of Paddy's style. Before setting out Hunt was going to write to Paddy. The letter was never written, and by the time he set off, Paddy was dead. How touched and fascinated he would have been to read this book."--Artemis Cooper, biographer of Patrick Leigh Fermor and co-editor of "The Broken Road"
In 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out 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, including "Between the Woods and the Water," are a half-remembered, half-reimagined journey through cultures now extinct and landscapes irrevocably altered by the traumas of the twentieth century.
Nick Hunt dreamed of following in Fermor's footsteps. Eighty years later he began his own "great trudge"--on foot all the way to Istanbul. He walked across eight countries, following two major rivers and crossing three mountain ranges. With only Fermor's books to guide him, he trekked some 2,500 miles from Holland to Turkey.
Why? For an old-fashioned adventure. To discover for himself what remained of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, the unknown, the deeper currents of myth that still flow beneath Europe's surface. This is a story worthy of Fermor's own.
Nick Hunt is a travel writer, freelance journalist, fiction writer, and storyteller whose articles have appeared in the "Economist," the "Guardian," and other publications. He is also co-editor of "The Dark Mountain."