Where the Indus Is Young: Midwinter in Baltistan - Couverture souple

Altogether the most appallingly fascinating travel book I have ever read (The Times)

Such is the author's love of travelling and of this untouched wilderness that the lasting impression left by this book is one of sheer joy (Sunday Telegraph)

It is her real reverence for natural beauty that gives her writing its special quality ... Dervla Murphy's books are so much more than traveller's tales (Daily Telegraph)

One of Dervla Murphy's most considerable gifts is the ability to choose, get into, live in - and take us back to - places where the world is as it was and probably ever shall be. She is a connoisseur of lost Arcadias (Times Literary Supplement)

The fascination of this book lies in the author's gallantry, humour and resource in conditions which would appal the stoutest explorers (Irish Times)

One winter, Dervla Murphy and her six-year-old daughter explored 'Little Tibet' high up in the Karakoram Mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas. For three months they travelled on foot and on pony along the perilous Indus Gorge and into nearby valleys. Even when beset by crumbling tracks over bottomless chasms, an assault by a lascivious Kashmiri, the unnerving melancholy of the Balts, and Rachel's continual probing questions, this formidable traveller retained her enthusiasm for her surroundings and her sense of humour.

Hair-raising, gloriously subjective and with the quirky vitality of fiction, the resulting book is a classic of travel writing.