Description

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a 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 Ionian 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 perhaps a 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.

Publisher Review

‘Extraordinarily engaging . . . thanks to Leigh Fermor’s ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase . . . a compelling story’ * London Review of Books * 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 * 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 * Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century * Financial Times * 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 * 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 * An extraordinary book of adventure and encounter, fantasy and learning, observation and experience * Sunday Times *