Freya Madeline Stark Book order

The travel classic by intrepid explorer Freya Stark, relating her journeys through the infamous 'Valleys of the Assassins' alone in the 1930s. A John Murray Journey.

This witty, eye-opening tapestry of writings on travel and a life spent as one of the 20th century's most formidable adventuresses is Freya Stark at her luminous best.

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.

A detailed account of famed travel writer Freya Stark's journey through the Mediterranean

Lycia, on the southwestern coast of Turkey, is an ancient land steeped in mystery, myth, and legend. Figured prominently throughout history and literature, Lycia is known as home to the fiery chimera; heartland of worship for the goddess Leto; old ally of Troy; lure to conquering Cyrus and Alexander; and irresistible destination for centuries of travelers, artists, and writers. Part of "The Turquoise Coast", Lycia now attracts more tourists to its glimmering shores than any other part of Turkey. In the early 1950s, following the trail of the ancient Persian and Greek traders, famed travel writer Freya Stark set out by boat to explore the Lycian coast. South from Smyrna, she was guided by traces of Lycia's rich history and cultural heritage. For all those who now follow in her wake, there can be no better, more evocative or knowledgable guide to Turkey's most enchanting coast.

Edged by the fearsome Empty Quarter to the North, the Arabian Sea to the South and resting on layers of history that stretch back to the dawn of human civilisation, the Hadhramaut is one of the wildest and most remote parts of Arabia, little-changed from when Freya Stark travelled there over 70 years ago.

Freya Stark was witness to the rise and fall of the British involvement in the country as well as the early years of independence. Painting a portrait of both the political and social preoccupations of the day as exquisitely as she does the people and landscapes of Iraq, this is a remarkable portrait of the country as it once was.

Freya Stark is most famous for her travels in Arabia at a time when very few men, let alone women, had fully explored its vast hinterlands. In 1934, she made her first journey to the Hadhramaut in what is now Yemen - the first woman to do so alone. Even though that journey ended in disappointment, sickness and a forced rescue, Stark, undeterred, returned to Yemen two years later. Starting in Mukalla and skirting the fringes of the legendary and unexplored Empty Quarter, she spent the winter searching for Shabwa - ancient capital of the Hadhramaut and a holy grail for generations of explorers. From within Stark's beautifully-crafted and deeply knowledgeable narrative emerges a rare and exquisitely-rendered portrait of the customs and cultures of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. "A Winter in Arabia" is one of the most important pieces of literature on the region and a book that placed Freya Stark in the pantheon of great writers and explorers of the Arab World. To listen to her voice is to hear the rich echoes of a land whose 'nakedness is clothed in shreds of departed splendour'.