Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

"The most beautifully written of modern "travel books" - an awkward term - may well be Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts (1977) closely followed by its sequel Between the Woods and the Water (1986). These two volumes lyrically memorialize a youthful walk across Europe in 1933-34, starting from the Hook of Holland and passing through Germany and much of Eastern Europe. . . . Artemis Cooper's excellent biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure , fills in the details, corrects errors and makes clear that Paddy - as he was always known - often conflated incidents or fudged details in his writing, sometimes for reasons of art, sometimes to protect a friend or a woman's reputation." -Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"Surprise is the keynote of the best travel writing. The travel writer should be knowledgeable but not an expert, open in mind and body to the unforeseen twists of serendipity. But what we most require from travel writing. . . is that elusive quality Nick Carraway defined as 'romantic readiness.' Few 20th- century figures combined these traits in a more appealing package than the English writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. . . . . Now Artemis Cooper has written an affectionately intimate, informative and forgiving biography. . . ."- Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review

"This engaging work sheds light on the life of one of Britain's greatest travel writers, with particular detail on his time in Greece, his war escapades, and his struggles with writing. Recommended for lovers of armchair travel and those who enjoyed Sir Patrick's own writings. "- Library Journal

"Artemis Cooper has done a brilliant job of piecing together the shards of evidence about this glamorous but elusive writer, who seemed not to be able to resist mixing fact and fiction in his own life story." -John Eliot Gardiner, The Wall Street Journal

"A fondly admiring account of the English wayfarer captures his enormously infectious spirit. . . A solid biography that should introduce more readers to Leigh Fermor's work." - Kirkus Reviews

"In her arresting biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, an ever-curious travel writer known for experiencing locales at ground- level, Cooper, studies a man determined to see the world firsthand, with interviews from family and friends, rare letters, and diaries. . . . Nostalgic and expertly written, Cooper fleshes out Fermor, a man who boldly traveled a world on the edge of catastrophe, which he explained in his writing to a faithful readership." - Publishers Weekly

One of The Independent 's "50 Best Winter Reads"

Short-listed for the inaugural Waterstones "Book of the Year"

"Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last year [2011] at the age of 96, was one of the travel-writing greats, a war hero who related his journeys as a young man through Europe in classics such as A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water . Artemis Cooper draws on years of interviews with the author and his friends in this much-anticipated biography." - The Guardian

"He lived an inspirationally heterodox life that combined adventure and reflection in unique measure. His story has hitherto been known only in parts, and mostly through the refractive prism of his own telling. At last his biography has been detailed in full, in Artemis Cooper's tender and excellent book. Reading it is an odd experience: there is the melancholy of having one's hero humanised, joined with renewed astonishment at the miracle he made of himself." - The Guardian

"Artemis Cooper's funny, wise, learned but totally candid biography reveals Leigh Fermor to be an adventurer through and through. The artifice of effortless gentility is blown away and Paddy is revealed as a much more interesting character, a fascinatingly self-made and self-educated man. He is also placed in the pantheon of literary liggers, a consummate lifelong freeloader, a prince among sponge-artists, which he paid for with his unique energy, talent and enthusiasm for song, dance, talk, m