Dervla Murphy

Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of her most recent journeys to Israel and Palestine, whether visiting families in Haifa highrises or Palestinean refugee camps.

Encounters in Israel and Palestine

Between River and Sea

In Ethiopia with a Mule

The author recounts her experiences traveling through the countryside of Madagascar with her daughter, and shares observations on the nation's history and culture

Muddling Through in Madagascar

The author travelled around Northern Ireland by bicycle. Her journey was undertaken to explore the north, both geographically and psychologically.

A Place Apart

Dervla Murphy's journal of her cycle tours of South Africa in 1994 gives a day-by-day view of that period.

Travels Through South Africa

South from the Limpopo

This book is pure Murphy; detailing her winter travels in the Karakoram Mountains and the frozen Western Himalayas, as she, her six year old daughter, and the four-footed Hallam navigated crumbling tracks and bottomless chasms.

A Winter in Baltistan

Where the Indus Is Young

Dervla Murphy describes her various journeys by air, bicycle, and foot in the remote and mountainous Lantang region near Tibet. Written with charm and sensitivity, this book reveals the vitality of an age-old civilization.

A Spell in Nepal

The Waiting Land

Through Siberia by Accident is a book about a journey that didn't happen - and what happened instead. Dervla Murphy never had any intention of spending three months in the vast territories of Siberia. Instead she had planned to go to Ussuriland, because it appealed to her as a place free from tourism. But by accident, or rather because she had an accident - a painful leg injury -, she found herself stymied in Eastern Siberia, a place she knew very little about. Although hardly able to walk, her subsequent experiences, in an unexpected place, and in an incapacitated state, provided many pleasant surprises. Above all she was struck by the extraordinary hospitality, generosity and helpfulness of the Siberians who made this strange phenomenon - a maimed Irish babushka - so welcome in their towns and homes. This book is an extraordinary story of fortitude and resourcefulness as Dervla Murphy finds friendship and culture in a seemingly monotonous, bleak and inhospitable place far from what we know as 'civilised'. Through Siberia by Accident is a voyage of Siberian self-discovery.

A Small Slice of Autobiography

Through Siberia by Accident

Silverland charts Dervla Murphy's extraordinary expedition through the snowscapes of Far Eastern Russia. No stranger to adventure, the intrepid septuagenarian's mid-winter journey takes her beyond Siberia to the furthest corners of Russia - areas proximate to Japan, Mongolia and the Arctic Circle. Here she discovers a strange world of lynx and elks, indigenous tribes and shamanism, reindeer broth and taiga-berry pie. She takes the coal-fuelled slow-train around regions hardly exposed to tourism and there she meets a host of colourful and generous characters. They invite this unconventional Irish Babushka into their homes where she enjoys fascinating fireside debate bolstered by steaming samovars of sweet tea. Just like its author, Silverland is insightful, warm and truly original.

A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals

Silverland

Dervla Murphy recounts the events, people, and ironies she encountered while living in Gaza during Summer 2011.

Encounters in Gaza

A Month by the Sea

From Kenya to Zimbabwe

The Ukimwi Road

Cameroon with Egbert

The intrepid explorer's journey to Romania.

A Travel Memoir

Transylvania and Beyond

From Bombay to the hippy beaches of Goa and on to the tropical trip of India, travelling by boat and bus, staying in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, Dervla Murphy and her five-year-old daughter explored the south. En route they fell in love with the tiny mountain paradise of Coorg, whose landscapes and people form the focus of a wonderfully evocative travel diary. This is an account of their journey. The author also wrote In Cameroon with Egbert, The Waiting Land and Muddling through in Madagascar.

An Experience of Southern India : a Travel Memoir

On a Shoestring to Coorg

Traveler Dervla Murphy recalls her unconventional first thirty years of life, including her bicycle trek from Dunkirk to India.

The Makings of a Traveller

Wheels Within Wheels

Travels of Another Sort

Tales from Two Cities

In Etiopia con un mulo

The Nuclear Stakes

Race to the Finish?

Nestled between Vietnam to the east, Myanmar and China to the north, Thailand to the west and Cambodia to the south, Laos has long suffered from the depredations of its larger neighbors. But the biggest bully in its history was the United States which, starting in 1964, carried on a secret war against Laos. By the time of the ceasefire in February 1973, Laos had become the most heavily bombed nation in the history of the world. When renowned travel writer Dervla Murphy went to Laos in 1997, she discovered a country that had only just opened its borders to the West. What she found was a country where the people-kind, gentle, welcoming-more than compensate for everything that can go wrong. But she also discovered that the persisting problems bequeathed by its recent past are tragic and other problems threaten its immediate future. A series of chance meetings left her with a profound sense of a beautiful country and a unique culture threatened-once again-by the extreme pressures of the modern world.

One Foot in Laos

Following A Month by the Sea, her acclaimed exploration of life in Gaza, Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of living with and among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in both Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with her customary curiosity, her acute ear and mind, her empathy, her openness to the experience and her moral seriousness. Behind the book lies a desire to communicate the reality of life on the ground, and to puzzle out for herself what might be done to alleviate the suffering of all who wish to share this land and to make peace in the region a possibility. Meeting the wise, the foolish and the frankly deluded, she gradually knits together a picture of the patchwork that constitutes both sides of the divide - Hamas and Fatah, rural and urban, refugee, indigenous inhabitant, Russian, Black Hebrew and Kabbalist to name but a fraction. She finds compassion and empathy in both communities, but is also appalled by instances of its lack on both sides - a Palestinan woman who will not concede the suffering of Jewish civilian victims of a suicide bomber, and the Jewish inhabitants of Hebron who make the lives of their Muslim neighbours a living hell. Clinging to hope, Dervla comes to believe that despite its difficulties the only viable future lies in a single democratic state of Israel/Palestine, based on one person, one vote - a One-State Solution.

Dervla Murphy

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