Travel the World with John Murray Journeys
8 July 2021 / £12.99
(B-format paperbacks with flaps)
Series Editor Nick Hunt
John Murray Journeys is a new list of travel writing comprising classic and rediscovered adventures, all with new introductions from some of today’s most exciting writers. The first five titles are published on 8 July, with more to follow in 2022.
John Murray Journeys celebrate the imprint’s history of publishing exceptional travel writing and will help readers to rediscover classic, timeless and forgotten journeys from the past at a time when so many of us long to travel. The titles will be a combination of books that have already played a key part in John Murray’s history and books that are new to the imprint, all with new introductions from some of today’s most exciting writers.
Two of the first five books in the series were originally published by John Murray:
The Valleys of the Assassins by Freya Stark was first published in 1934 and chronicles the author’s travels through Iran in the 1930s. It is introduced by award-winning author Monisha Rajesh.
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor is the beloved first book of Fermor’s epic trilogy recounting his ‘great trudge’ from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul that began in 1933 when he was eighteen. This edition includes the late-Jan Morris’s 2005 introduction.
The other three books on the 2021 list will be published under the John Murray imprint for the first time:
A Vagabond for Beauty is a collection of letters and diary excerpts by the young artist Everett Ruess, who disappeared aged twenty in the canyonlands of Utah – the mystery of his disappearance remains unsolved to this day. Everett’s writing, which is compiled by the late-W L Rusho, is published for the first time in the UK, and introduced by Booker-shortlisted author Paul Kingsnorth.
The Cruel Way recounts the journey that Ella K Maillart took in a Ford motorcar from Switzerland to Afghanistan in 1939 with Annemarie Schwarzenbach – the two women travelling partly to escape war in Europe and partly in an attempt to break Schwarzenbach’s addiction to morphine. The Cruel Way is introduced by Booker-shortlisted author Fiona Mozley and also includes excerpts from All The Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, recently reissued by Seagull Books.
Mississippi Solo is the youngest book in the series and explores Eddy L Harris’s 1988 canoe journey on the Mississippi River, from its source in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, in which the author battled against the power of the mighty river and confronted modern racism and the legacy of slavery. The book is being published for the first time in the UK and will feature an introduction by Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Adam Weymouth.
‘When I asked for suggestions for overlooked travel classics to bring back into print, the response from travel writers, nature writers and readers was overwhelming. Some books required tracking down on the dusty shelves of obscure archives, while others came to find me – one of those we’re republishing simply appeared on my doorstep one day, thanks to a passing neighbour. From over a hundred recommendations this wonderful handful of books has emerged, representing a diversity of background, experience and style, different forms of transport (including car, camel and canoe) and far-flung places and times, from Afghanistan in the 1930s to America in the 1980s. From intricate literary prose to diary entries scribbled in a Utah canyon, all of these books are invitations to illuminating, often surprising journeys and remind us that the world is a wide and extraordinary place.’ Series editor, Nick Hunt
NOTES TO EDITORS:
Freya Stark was an Anglo-Italian explored and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as several autobiographical works and essays. During World War II she worked for the British Ministry of Information in Aden, Baghdad and Cairo, where she funded the anti-Nazi Brotherhood of Freedom.
Everett Ruess was a young artist and wanderer who disappeared in the canyonlands of Utah at the age of only twenty, leaving behind extensive letters, diary excerpts and artworks that tell the story of his travels in the wilderness. His fate remains unknown.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was an author, scholar and soldier. Aged only eighteen in 1933 when he set out to walk across Europe, reaching Constantinople in 1935. He travelled on to Greece and lived mainly in Romania until the outbreak of war. Serving in occupied Crete, he led a successful operation to kidnap a German general, for which he won the DSO.
Ella K Maillart was a Swiss writer, adventurer and sportswoman who travelled extensively throughout Asia including a 3,500-mile journey from Peking to Srinagar with Peter Fleming. Her travels and journalism covered the USSR, Central Asia, China and the Near East. She was also an Olympic sailor, champion hockey player and international skier. For the first time The Cruel Way includes excerpts from All The Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, recently reissued by Seagull Books.
Eddy L Harris is a writer and filmmaker from Missouri. He is the author of six books including Native Stranger, which was selected as a ‘Notable Book’ by the New York Times in 1992. In 2017 he released River to the Heart, a documentary film about his Mississippi journey. He lives in France.
The series editor Nick Hunt is the author of Walking the Woods and the Water – which was a finalist for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2014 – and Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes. Nick has walked and written across much of Europe and he has written for the Economist, the Guardian and other publications, and he also works as a storyteller and co-editor for the Dark Mountain Project. Asking for suggestion for overlooked travel classics to bring back into print, the response was overwhelming, and the books for the 2021 list were drawn from over a hundred books.
The series has been beautifully and distinctively designed by Istanbul-based designer Laris Alara Kilimci at LAR Studios.
JM travel history
John Murray has a rich and star-studded heritage in travel writing, beginning in 1836 the innovative Murrays Handbooks for Travellers. After his own experience of travelling on the continent, and at a time when domestic and foreign travel was opening up, Murray’s guides covered tourist destinations in Europe and parts of Asia and northern Africa.
Over the next two centuries JM has published some of the most important travel books from captivating tales of intrepid explorers who journeyed through exotic and distant lands – among them explorer Dr Livingstone, mountaineer Edward Whymper and Isabella Bird (the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society) – to twentieth-century writers whose writing captured the rapidly changing world around them, including Freya Stark, Dervla Murphy and Patrick Leigh Fermor.
John Murray is an imprint of John Murray Press, whose parent company is Hachette UK.
