Hardback: To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven...a time to keep silence and a time to speak. Ecclesiastes: III, 1 & 7.
From the French Abbey of St Wandrille to the abandoned and awesome Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, the celebrated travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor studies the rigorous contemplative lives of the monks and the timeless beauty of their monastic surroundings.
In his occasional retreats, the peaceful solitude and the calm enchantment of the monasteries was passed on as a kind of 'supernatural windfall' which A Time to Keep Silence (2021) so effortlessly records.
A Time to Keep Silence was first published in Great Britain in 1957 by John Murray Publishers.
About the author: Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was born of English and Irish descent. He was only eighteen when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, a now famous journey described many years later in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He enlisted in the Irish Guards in 1939 and fought in Greece and Crete, where, disguised as a shepherd, he lived for over two years in the mountains organizing the resistance. In 1944, he led the party that captured the German Commander General Kreipe, an event immortalised in the film Ill Met by Moonlight, starring Dirk Bogarde. He was awarded the OBE in 1943 and the DSO in 1944.
Patrick Leigh Fermor's books have won many awards including the W H Smith Literary Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Award and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. He lived partly in Greece in the house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire.
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