A Time of Gifts - livre d'occasion

Fermor, Patrick Leigh. A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, The Broken Road. 3 volumes (complete set). London, John Murray, 1977. Octavo. Pagination: (Time of Gifts) [frontispiece] [8], 291, [1] pages / (Woods and Water) [10], 248 pages / (Broken Road) xxii, 362 pages. Original Hardcover with illustrated dustjackets. The three volumes in first edition of Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his epic walk to Constantinople, now seen as one of the great works of travel literature in the language. All three books are first editions in their jackets, the first volume near fine in blue publisher's boards, without ownership inscriptions to the book. The jacket is very good with a bright front panel showing John Craxton's evocative central European design, some fading to the orange background on the spine and foxing to the rear blue panel. Between the Woods and the Water is near fine in a very good jacket which has been price clipped. The Broken Road is fine in a fine jacket with a small 2013 ownership signature on the first endpaper. It was Patrick Leigh Fermor's good fortune to set out on his great adventure in the early nineteen thirties before Nazism and the Second World War changed the Europe for ever, but to wait forty years before writing the first two volumes of his luminous narrative. His account of German beer cellars, of Prague under snow and love in Vienna, all occurring while the shadow of Nazism looms, bears comparison with Chatwin, Robert Byron and the best twentieth century writers in any genre. Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 - 10 June 2011), also known as Paddy Fermor, was a British author, scholar and soldier who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War. He was widely regarded as Britain's greatest living travel writer during his lifetime, based on books such as A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once desc..