Eric Newby

A Preposterous Adventure

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

Slowly Down the Ganges

An account of the author's experiences, 28 years ago, as an escaping POW in Italy during World War II

Love and War in the Apennines

Featuring Henry James on the Epsom Derby, Cecil Beaton on an evening with the Rolling Stones in Marrakesh, and Hannibal on crossing the Alps, this anthology offers more than three hundred travel pieces dating from 430 B.C. to the 1980s

A Book of Travellers' Tales

The Big Red Train Ride

Lonely Planet A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

A SHORT WALK IN THE HINDU KUSH

In 1967, Eric Newby and his wife Wanda acquired “ I Castagni” (The Chestnuts) , a small and ruined farmhouse in the foothills of the Apuan Alps on the borders of Liguria and northern Tuscany. They were the first foreigners to live in the area, and for 25 years, they remained the only ones. This book recounts the Newbys` life in their house in a forgotten era. It describes how they pulled the house back from the brink of collapse, their enduring friendship with the neighbouring contadini, who welcomed them - whether eating, drinking, harvesting grapes and olives, or hunting for fungus and wild asparagus - from the moment they arrived.

A Small Place in Italy

An illustrated ebook documenting the hugely varied and always entertaining career of one of Britain’s best-loved travel writers.

Around the World in 80 Years

When Eric Newby, improbably earning his living in the London haute-couture trade, sent his fateful cable – CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE? – it was the first step on a legendary journey from Mayfair to Afghanistan and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, north-east of Kabul. Ill-prepared and inexperienced, Newby and Carless endured a month of hardship with great good humour in one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth. ‘The most successful travel writer of his generation. It’s impossible to read this book without laughing aloud’ Observer ‘Tough, extrovert, humorous and immensely literate’ Times Literary Supplement ‘Full of serendipity and surprise’ The Economist ‘A total success’ New Yorker

As they travel around the sea at the center of Western history, Eric Newby and his wife Wanda visit not only the better-known Mediterranean sights and cities but also venture into places where Westerners are few: Albania under Hoxha, the holy Muslim city of Fez, and a country about to disappear in civil war - the former Yugoslavia. Eric Newby entertains and enlightens as he follows in the footsteps of Cleopatra and St John, and waits for a meeting with Colonel Gaddafi. With his customary flair for description, he is equally at easy pondering King David's choice of Jerusalem as the site for a capital city or enjoying a meal cooked by one of France's finest chefs. His acute curiosity and encyclopedic knowledge combine to make absorbing reading, whether he is explaining the workings of a defunct Turkish harem or the contemporary Mafia. From antiquity to the present, Eric Newby's erudite, engaging tale is not a simple tour but a tour de force.

On the Shores of the Mediterranean

This is the author's account of how in the autumn of 1985, more or less on the spur of the moment, he and his wife Wanda set out to find Ireland on two wheels apiece. Lashed by storms of winter, fuelled by Guinness and warmed by thermal underwear, they set out on their travels along the highways and byways of the isle of Erin, with (bicycle's) pannier packed with maps, spare parts and a veritable library of books on Ireland's stones and stories.

Round Ireland in Low Gear

The renowned Eric Newby recounts his offbeat world travels. (SEE QUOTE.)

Departures and Arrivals

Diana Petry

A Personal Choice of 484

Wonders of Ireland

Ein Spaziergang im Hindukusch

‘Slowly Down the Ganges’ is seen as a vintage Newby masterpiece, alongside ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ and ‘Love and War in the Apennines’. Told with Newby's self-deprecating humour and wry attention to detail, this is a classic of the genre and a window into an enchanting piece of history.

A sparkling anthology of several centuries worth of the world's best travel writing, assembled by the legendary Eric Newby, the author of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Love and War in the Apennines, and one of Britain's pre-eminent and best-loved travel-writers.In 1985 Eric Newby compiled an immensely successful anthology of travel-writing called Travellers Tales that was distinguished by its originality and the genuine affection with which each entry had been chosen and described. Newby's enthusiasm and love for the subject shone out on every page, and the book became a travel-writing classic.Now, nearly 20 years later, Newby returns with a collection even more far-ranging and delightfully entertaining. A virtually endless treasure-trove of the bizarre, the touching, the profound and the farcical, A Book of Lands and Peoples is a collection of staggering scope and range. From Herodotus to Wilfred Thesiger, from Christopher Columbus to Paul Theroux, from Nick Danziger to Marco Polo, Eric Newby has brought together the absolute cream of the travel-writing crop into one beautiful and fascinating volume. There is simply no other book like it.

A Book of Lands and Peoples

This book is a lush and beautiful memoir of a very special house and a superb recreation of a bygone era.

Highly observant, with a keen sense of the incongruous, Newby is always entertaining in this recollection of highlights from an eventful life. He transports the reader around the world, from his earliest childhood adventures, to an elephant fair in India.

Eric Newby

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