Dervla Murphy

Braving hunger, heat exhaustion, unbearable terrain, and cultures largely untouched by civilisation, Dervla Murphy chronicles her determined trip through nine countries, through snow and ice in the mountains and miles of barren land in the scorching desert. Full Tilt is a highly individual account by a celebrated travel writer, based on the daily diary Murphy kept while riding through Yugoslavia,...

Cycling? It's one of my life's constants, it feeds my need for beauty, for delight and for aimless exploring. It makes my body hum and brings me safely back to the present. I hope to continue pedalling, nice and slowly, for the rest of my life, with the same curiosity that ignited my childhood. In these essays, twelve writers consider...

Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She developed an acute eye for the way in which isolation has shaped this society, meeting 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...

A Place Apart is a remarkable geographical and psychological travelogue that rises above history, politics, theology and economics. Created by a southern Irishwoman, cycling into the mayhem of Northern Ireland in order to try and sort out her own opinions and emotions about this troubled land. She came equipped with her own childhood experiences of murder and Republican martyrdom, but...

In 1966, Dervla Murphy travelled the length and breadth of Ethiopia, first on a mule named Jock, after her publisher, and later on a recalcitrant donkey. The remarkable achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or the thousand-mile trail, but the gradual growth of affection for and understanding of another race. In Ethiopia with a Mule offers a fascinating glimpse...

This is the third of Dervla Murphy's early travel books: an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman. Yet it can also be seen as the completion of a trilogy of books concerned with her experience of self-sufficient mountain cultures, first tasted in crossing Persia and Afghanistan in Full Tilt, and deepened with her experience of working...

Dervla Murphy's first epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle, Full Tilt, is a complete adventure in itself. It is also the first volume of a trilogy of experience that continues with Tibetan Foothold. For the young Irish woman, once she had got herself to India by July 1963, she immersed herself in the life of the sub-continent, working...

Following A Month by the Sea, her acclaimed exploration of life in Gaza, Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of living with and among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in both 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...

This is the first travel book that tested the idea that a five-year-old daughter makes for a useful international travelling companion. Together, Dervla Murphy and her daughter Rachel, with little money, no taste for luxury, and few concrete plans, meander their way slowly south from Bombay to the southernmost point of India, Cape Comorin. Interested in everything they see, but...