And some of the evocations of landscapes and views will live long in the memory.-Anthony Sattin, The Observer The descriptions of waking in unfamiliar places are so seductive that even the most home-hugging reader will long to wake somewhere unknown. It confirms that Leigh Fermor was, along with Robert Byron, the greatest travel writer of his generation, and this final volume assures the place of the trilogy as one of the masterpieces of the genre, indeed one of the masterworks of postwar English non-fiction.-William Dalrymple, The Guardian Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Review of Booksīy any standards, this is a major work. When you put down The Broken Road you feel what himself felt on departing from Mount Athos.'a great deal of regret.' Worth, The New York Times Book Reviewįermor's gift of observation transcends time, fusing the classical with the modern in prose of voluminous richness. He seems to carry within himself a whole troupe of sharp-eyed geographers, art historians, ethnologists and multilingual poets. His memory seems eidetic his eyes miss nothing. The greatest pleasure of all, as usual, is Leigh Fermor's own infectious, Rabelaisian hunger for knowledge of almost every kind.
#As i walk these broken roads originally published full#
Throughout it we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure.īy Patrick Leigh Fermor and Colin Thubron, edited by Artemis CooperĪn unforgettable book, full of strange encounters with a prewar Balkan cast of counts, prostitutes, peasants, priests and castrati. The book ends, perfectly, with Paddy's arrival in Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for. Days and nights on the road, spectacular landscapes and uncanny cities, friendships lost and found, leading the high life in Bucharest or camping out with fishermen and shepherds-in the The Broken Road such incidents and escapades are described with all the linguistic bravura, odd and astonishing learning, and overflowing exuberance that Leigh Fermor is famous for, but also with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time, especially when he meditates on the scarred history of the Balkans or on his troubled relations with his father. Assembled from Leigh Fermor's manuscripts by his prizewinning biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, this is perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor's books, catching up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934 and following him through Bulgaria and Romania to the coast of the Black Sea.
The Broken Road is the long-awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011.
Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, two books now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time. In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick ("Paddy") Leigh Fermor set out on a walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him almost a year.
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