Perseus in the Wind - Couverture souple

'It was rare to leave her company without feeling that the world was somehow larger and more promising. Her life was something of a work of art... The books in which she recorded her journeys were seductively individual... Nomad and social lioness, public servant and private essayist, emotional victim and mythmaker.' (Colin Thubron, New York Times)

'Few writers have the capacity to do with words what Fabergé could do with gems to fashion them, without violating their quality. It is this extraordinary talent which sets Freya Stark apart from her fellow craftsman in the construction of books on travel.' (The Daily Telegraph)

'Freya Stark remains unexcelled as an interpreter of brief encounters in wild regions against the backdrop of history.' --(The Observer)

'Versatile, prolific, erudite, truly she was the greatest woman traveller of her age, and her books continue to inspire.' --(Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Country Life)

Freya Stark remains unexcelled as an interpreter of brief encounters in wild regions against the backdrop of history. --- The Observer

Written just after the Second World War, Perseus in the Wind (named after the constellation) is perhaps the most personal, and haunting, of all Freya Stark's writings. She muses on the seasons, the effect light has on a landscape at a particular time of day, the smell of the earth after rain, Muslim saints, Indian temples, war and old age. Each chapter is devoted to a particular theme: happiness (simple pleasures, like her father's passion for the view from his cabin in Canada); education (to be able to command happiness, recognize beauty, value death, increase enjoyment); beauty (incongruous, flighty and elusive - a description of the stars, the burst of flowers in a park); death (a childhood awareness of the finality of time, the meaningfulness of the end); memory (the jewelled quality of literature, pleasure, love, an echo or a scent when aged by the passage of time). For those who have loved her travel writing, Perseus in the Wind illuminates the motivations behind her journeys and the woman behind the traveller.