Why Fermor couldnвЂ™t complete the trilogy himself is unclear. Assembled by his biographer Artemis Cooper and British writer Colin Thubron, itвЂ™s basically the manuscript of A Youthful Journey polished up a bit, though Cooper and Thubron claim that вЂњscarcely a phraseвЂќ in it is theirs. The Broken Road is something of a stand-in for the long, long awaited third volume that Fermor planned to write. Between the Woods and the Water followed nine years later, taking him as far as the Iron Gates separating the Balkan and Carpathian mountains and ending with the words вЂњTO BE CONCLUDED.вЂќ With the posthumous publication of The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, it kind of is. A Time of Gifts, which covers his walk from Holland to the middle Danube, was published in 1977.

By the time he took it up again, 10 or so years later on, heвЂ™d decided to start from the beginning again and write not one book but three. As it happened, it became neither as, busy building a house in the Peloponnese, Fermor abandoned the project altogether.

His long-suffering publisher suggested A Youthful Journey instead. Fermor wanted to call it Parallax, to underline the dual vantage of adolescence and middle age. He managed to cover the first two-thirds of the trip in a mere 70 pages, but the conclusion ballooned into a book of its own. In 1962, Holiday magazine asked Fermor to write an article on вЂњThe Pleasures of Walking,вЂќ which he took as a chance to revisit the вЂњGreat TrudgeвЂќ of his youth. But it was a long road getting there-a kind of parallel journey. Eighty years later, we finally have the complete account of that trip.

Broken roads series