Full Tilt

At ten, Dervla Murphy was given a bicycle and an atlas. Prompted by letters exchanged with a Sikh pen pal, she began quietly planning a journey to India. In 1963, at thirty-one, she finally set out, and this book grows out of the daily diary she kept along the way.

Her route took her through the Balkans, Iran and Afghanistan, then over the Himalayas into Pakistan and India. A woman travelling alone by bicycle, with a revolver in her trouser pocket, was something nobody had seen before, and she drew intense curiosity wherever she went.

She met heavy snow, floods and robbery. She used her .25 pistol on starving wolves and to frighten off predatory men, and she depended on the generosity of nomads. She completed the journey and, in doing so, helped create a kind of adventure travel that has inspired many travellers since.

More than fifty years after it first appeared, Full Tilt is still a much-loved classic of travel writing.