The Accursed Mountains: Journeys In Albania

Description

Travelling by bus, on foot, by mule and horse, staying with Albanians in their houses and crumbling Stalinist tower blocks, Robert Carver meets Vlach shepherds and village intellectuals, ex-Communist Special Forces officers and juvenile heroin smugglers, missionaries with jeeps and light planes, and ex-prisoners of Enver Hoxha who have spent 45 years in the Albanian gulag. In the remote villages of the Accursed Mountains of the far north, he is the first Briton seen since World War II, when Intelligence officers were parachuted in to help fight the German occupiers. On his journey to Lake Gashit, high above the snowline on the Serb-Montenegrin border, Carver survives murder attempts and suicidal bus rides. He sees villages last visited by outsiders in 1933, which had effectively been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.

Robert Carver was brought up in Cyprus, Turkey and India. Educated at the Scuola Medici, Florence, and Durham University, where he read Oriental Studies and Politics, he taught English in a maximum security gaol in Australia and worked as a BBC World Service reporter in Eastern Europe and the Levant. Four of his plays have been broadcast by the BBC. He has written for the Sunday Times, Observer, Daily Telegraph and other papers and is the author of The Accursed Mountains (Flamingo 1999) and Paradise with Serpernts (2007).

Praise for The Accursed Mountains: 'One of the most exciting travel books for a generation' Spectator '...enviable writing skills, fresh horrors on every page' The Times