When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India. A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantities, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable

‘Continuously entertaining ... continuously astonishing.’ - Sunday Telegraph

‘She avoided wolves, floods, robbery, had three ribs broken in a brawl in an Afghan bus... suffered extremes of heat and cold, ate everything, liked almost everybody.’ - Homes and Gardens

After her epic journey from Ireland to India in 1963, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in the life of the subcontinent, working for six months in an orphanage for Tibetan children in Northern India. She fell in love with the ‘Tiblets’ – the cheerful, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children of the new Tibet-in-exile – but she also managed to explore India’s Tibetan frontier, leaving the reader panting in her wake. Tibetan Foothold not only confirmed Dervla’s status as a traveller, but also revealed her to be a truly independent voice and an acute observer of politics and society.

‘Humour and sturdiness are only the half of it: Dervla Murphy is that rare traveller who can make the world seem both wider and more intimate.’ - Observer

‘This is a moving – at times even harrowing – story. But it is leavened by the writer’s irrepressible zest for life, her warm humanity, her courage and good humour.’ - Irish Independent

The Waiting Land is the third in a series of books tracing Dervla’s involvement with the self-sufficient mountain cultures of the Himalayas. Lured by the chance to work again with refugees (a group of five hundred Tibetans lodged in tents in the remote Pokhara valley), Dervla settles down to live in a tiny, vermin-infested room above a stall in a bazaar. Here she falls under the spell of the ancient land of Nepal, poised between East and West, between China and India, between Buddhism and Hinduism, yet true to its own distinct civilization. Dervla’s understanding of the roots of the Nepalese past, and her own stamina, culminate in an epic trek into the remote Langtang region on the border with Tibet.

‘She revels in bizarre experiences and strange encounters in a land where the only thing certain is that the unpredictable always happens.’ - Irish Independent

‘Dashing in her insight, beautifully responsive to environment, supportive to peopleof most sorts, sometimes exceedingly funny.’ - TLS

Inspired by childhood stories of Prester John and the Queen of Sheba, in 1966 Dervla Murphy bought Jock, an amiable pack-mule in order to treck across the highlands of this awesome, but troubled land. She wandered south from the Red Sea shore to Sheba’s Aksum, and upto the icy roof of Africa, the Semien mountains. From there she descended to the ruined palaces of Gondar and skirted the northern shore of Lake Tana before crossing the drought-afflicted high ranges to Lalibela. Having exchanged the exhausted Jock (named after her publisher) for an un-cooperative donkey, Dervla completed her journey to Addis Ababa. Her real achievement, was not surviving three armed robberies or a thousand mile trail but rather the growing affection and understanding of another race.

‘One of the supreme virtues of Miss Murphy as a travel writer – she is human. She needs her drink; she craves her cigarettes; she is capable of losing her temper; she smuggles things through customs. A more virtuous figure would be far less endearing’ - Daily Telegraph

Dervla Murphy and her daughter Rachel – with little money, no taste for luxury and few concrete plans – meander their way slowly south from Bombay to the southernmost point of India, Cape Comorin. Interested in everything they see, but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fishermen’s huts and no-star hotels, travelling in packed-out buses, on foot and by local boats.

Instead of pressing ever onwards, like so many travellers, they double back to the place they liked most, the hill province of Coorg and settle down to live there for two months. Dervla Murphy creates an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of these cardamon-scented, spiritually and agriculturally self-sufficient Highlands.

‘A travel writer of rare quality and freshness.’ - The Observer

‘Murphy spans the wide range of sensation of India, where moments of great happiness come hard upon frustration and stench.’- The Guardian

In Where the Indus is Young, Dervla Murphy’s indomitable will is matched by that of four-footed Hallam and her six-year-old daughter Rachel. Together they make a mockery of fear, trekking through the awe-inspiring Karakorum mountains not only in the heart of winter, but close to Pakistan’s disputed border with Kashmir. They work their way up beside the perilous gorge carved through the mountains by the Indus, lodging with locals and eating, sleeping and bargaining with the Balts, who farm one of the remotest regions on earth.

Despite the hardship, Dervla never forgets the point of travel, re- taining enthusiasm for her magnificent surroundings and using her sense of humour to bring out the best in her hosts, who are often locked into the melancholic mood of mid-winter.

‘...the most appallingly fascinating travel book that I have ever read.’ - Jan Morris, The Times

‘... the lasting impression left by this book is one of sheer joy.’ - Colin Thubron, Sunday Telegraph

At the height of The Troubles, Dervla Murphy bicycled to Northern Ireland to try to understand the situation by speaking to people on either side of the divide.

Despite her own family connections to the IRA, she travelled north largely unfettered by sectarian loyalties. Armed instead with an indefatigable curiosity, a fine ear for anecdote, an ability to stand her own at the bar and a penetrating intelligence, she navigated her way through horrifying situations, and sometimes found herself among people stiff with hate and grief. But equally, she discovered an unquenchable thirst for life and peace, a spirit that refused to die.

‘Genial, tolerant and affectionate. It seems incredible that such a foul oyster should produce such a pearl.’ - The Times

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self – strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first – her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death.

Here lie the roots of Dervla’s gift for friendship, her love of writing, her curiosity, her hatred of cant, her hardiness and her desire to travel. Bicycling fifty miles in a day at the age of eleven, alone, it seems only natural that her first major journey should have been to cycle to India.

‘An extraordinary book, reflecting an extraordinary woman and one of the great travellers of our time.’ - William Trevor, The Times

‘A giant of travel writing.’ - Matthew Parris, BBC Radio 4

Over the summer of 2011, in her eightieth year, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Used to western reporters dashing in and out of the Strip in times of crisis, the people she met were touched by her genuine, unflinching interest and opened their hearts to her. What she finds are a people who, far from the story we are so often fed, overwhelmingly long for peace and an end to the violence that has so grossly distorted their lives. The impression we take away from the book is of a people whose real, complex, nuanced voice has never been heard before.

‘Her book is a kind of wake-up call to the world.’ - Colm Tóibín

‘A Month By the Sea is a restless antidote to the easy road of indifference ... a fist-clenched polemic, an octogenarian waving magnificently, not drowning.’- TLS

Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of her most recent journeys into Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with her customary curiosity, her acute ear and mind, her empathy, her openness to the experience and her moral seriousness. Behind the book lies a desire to communicate the reality of life on the ground, and to puzzle out for herself what might be done to alleviate the suffering of all who wish to share this land and to make peace in the region a possibility. 

'‘There are no no-go areas for the wonderfully intrepid Dervla Murphy.’ - Donald Macintyre, Independent