Perseus in the Wind: A Life of Travel

Freya Stark's Perseus in the Wind is a personal and haunting travel book that explores themes of happiness, education, beauty, death, and memory. It illuminates the motivations behind her journeys and the woman behind the traveller.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 16 May 2019
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

She has written the best travel books of her generation and her name will survive as an artist in prose. - 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 Freya Stark's journeys and the woman behind the traveller.

Weight: 162g
Dimension: 130 x 196 x 12 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781838601812