When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India. A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alar...

Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of her most recent journeys into 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 g...

Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Through reported conversations she creates a vivid picture of life in this coastal fragment of self-governing Palestine. Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with the rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enj...

In Where the Indus is Young , Dervla Murphy's indomitable will is matched by that of four-footed Hallam and her six-year-old daughter Rachel. Together they make a mockery of fear, trekking through the awe-inspiring Karakorum mountains not only in the heart of winter, but close to Pakistan's disputed border with Kashmir. They work their way up beside the perilous gorge carved through the mountains by the Indus, lodging with locals and eating, sleeping and bargaining with the Balts, who farm...

Take a three-generation family holiday in Cuba in the company of Dervla Murphy, her daughter and three young granddaughters and you have a Swallows-and-Amazons-like adventure in the Caribbean as they trek into the hills and along the coast as a family, camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars and relishing the ubiquitous Cuban hospitality. But this is no more than the joyful start of a fully-fledged quest to understand the unique society created by the Cuban Revolution. For Dervla re...

With her fourteen-year-old daughter Rachel, Dervla Murphy journeyed across the unique island of Madagascar, neither part of Africa, its nearest neighbour, nor part of Asia, the ancestral home the Malagasy people who live there. Beginning at Antananarivo, Madagascar's capital, they travelled south by foot, bus and truck through the Ankaratra Mountains, marvelling at lemurs in the Isoala Massif, exploring the great rain forests of the Betsimisaraka tribesmen and living briefly with the Vezo ...

Shortly after the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Dervla Murphy travelled to Romania and found a nation both exhilarated and bewildered by revolution. Eager to explore a country that had hitherto been inaccessible to outsiders, Murphy describes in lucid detail a journey on two planes: cycling and ambling through the rural Carpathians, and exploring the mind-set of a post-Communist society in the grips of an identity crisis. She is treated to tremendous hospitality wherever she goes, and in...

South from Limpopo is a social, cultural and political journey through South Africa, before, during and after the transfer of power in 1994, by the much-loved and formidable travel writer, Dervla Murphy. It is an account of three journeys, covering more than 6000 miles by bicycle, which took Murphy through all nine provinces of the new South Africa. She talked to people of all colours and political persuasions from wealthy and fearful whites, to impoverished, rural Boers and black farm lab...

Dervla Murphy and her five-year-old daughter Rachel- with little money, no taste for luxury and few concrete plans- meander slowly from Bombay to the southernmost tip of India. Interested in everything they see but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, travelling in packed-out buses, on foot and by local boats. They double back to the place they liked most, the hill province of Coorg, and settle down to live there for two months. Here, anchored b...

Traveller Dervla Murphy and her nine-year-old daughter Rachel, accompanied by an endearing mule named Juana, clambered the length of Peru with only the most basic supplies to sustain them, spending most of their time above 10,000 feet. Their gruelling journey was marked by discomfort and danger, though mother and daughter remained resilient throughout, sustained by their great affection for the beauty of the Andes and impoverished people who live there. Eight Feet in the Andes takes the re...

Inspired by childhood stories of Prester John and the Queen of Sheba, in 1966 Dervla Murphy bought Jock, an amiable pack-mule, and set off to trek across the highlands of this awesome but troubled land. She wandered south from the Red Sea shore to Sheba's Aksum and up onto the icy roof of Africa, the Semien mountains. From there she descended to the ruined palaces of Gondar and skirted the northern shore of Lake Tana before crossing the drought-afflicted high ranges to Lalibela. Having exc...

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first - her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death. Here lie the roots of Derv...