The Violins of Saint-Jacques

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.

Excellent ... A graceful picture of life on an unusual and exotic island that has both colour and charm Times Literary Supplement A brilliant set piece ... Patrick Leigh Fermor has a fine visual imagination New Statesman A stylish and accomplished piece of sustained good writing ... with a strange beauty Glasgow Herald Patrick Leigh Fermor evokes the imaginary past with unremitting devotion ... enchantingly pretty Observer Elegant and vividly exotic ... The story of the island and the echoing romance of its last Mardi Gras is done with brilliant aesthetic feeling and with a charming philosophic melancholy The Times This little masterpiece is a perfect tour de force Simon Winchester An exuberant and highly-developed traveller's tale, garlanded with deeply enjoyed and lovingly precise detail Sunday Times Beautiful is the adjective which comes uppermost ... [Patrick Leigh Fermor] is a writer with outstanding descriptive powers John Betjeman, Daily Telegraph 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 brings alive the glamour and the passions of the planters in their heyday Geographical Magazine 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

Excellent ... A graceful picture of life on an unusual and exotic island that has both colour and charm Times Literary Supplement