A Time of Gifts

The first volume of a celebrated trilogy, this memoir recounts the author’s youthful journey on foot across Europe in 1933–34, from the Hook of Holland to the Danube. Written decades later with extraordinary grace and erudition, it blends vivid travel narrative with reflections on history, language, art, and the vanishing world of prewar Europe. Moving through the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, the young traveler encounters monks, aristocrats, laborers, and fellow wanderers, capturing a continent on the brink of upheaval. Renowned as one of the twentieth century’s great travel writers, the author brings a poet’s eye and a scholar’s depth to this coming-of-age adventure, making it a classic of literary travel and a poignant portrait of a lost Europe.