The Broken Road

"This is the very long awaited conclusion to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s unforgettable, three-part travelogue, which describes his adventures during a walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (a name he romantically preferred to Istanbul) as a young man in the early 1930s. The first volume, published in 1977, astonished readers with its picaresque cast of characters and vast, seemingly effortless erudition about between-wars Europe and the myriad shifting empires that preceded it. The second volume, published in 1986, was equally celebrated, but the end of the tale lay unfinished for decades, as an aging Fermor suffered from writer’s block. Finished posthumously by travel writer Colin Thubron and Fermor biographer Artemis Cooper, The Broken Road describes Fermor’s arrival in Istanbul and his push on to Greece, where he eventually made his home. Occupying a place somewhere between fiction and nonfiction — Fermor was said to have had a prodigious memory, but admitted later that he’d taken some liberties filling in the blanks — the trilogy stands out for its lyrical prose and piercing intelligence, both lightly worn."

"they are transcendent works, narratives of Leigh Fermor's walk across Europe in the early 1930s — descriptions of lands and their people in the most elegant, beautiful prose to be found anywhere."