Mani

Description

For the first time in John Murray B-format paperback, this is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a barely-written part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and lonian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe. Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains a perhaps stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa...Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli. in a house he designed and built.

After his famous walk across Europe - recounted in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water - Patrick Leigh Fermor lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania and fought in Greece and Crete - living disguised as a shepherd in the mountains for two years organising resistance activities. He was awarded the DSO and CBE, and a knighthood in the 2004 new Year Honours List. His writing career, spanning over fifty years, includes six other titles available in John Murray paperback. He lives in Greece, in a house he designed and built.

'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 20040801 '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 20040801 'Extraordinarily engaging ... thanks to Leigh Fermor's ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase ...a compelling story' -- London Review of Books 20050818