Book description
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.
Dervla Murphy was born on 28 November 1931 of parents whose
families were both settled in Dublin as far back as can be traced. Her
grandfather and most of his family were involved in the Irish
Republican movement. Her father was appointed Waterford County
Librarian in 1930 after three years internment in Wormwood Scrubs
prison and seven years at the Sorbonne. Her mother was invalided by
arthritis when Dervla was one year old. She was educated at the
Ursuline Convent in Waterford until she was fourteen, when, because of
the wartime shortage of servants, she left to keep house for her
father and to nurse her mother. Dervla did this for sixteen years with
occasional breaks bicycling on the Continent. Her mother's death left
her free to go farther afield and in 1963 she cycled to India. There
she worked with Tibetan refugee children before returning home after a
year to write her first two books. Full Tilt was published in 1965 and
over twenty other travel books have followed. She still lives in
County Waterford. Her daughter, Rachel, and three granddaughters live
in Italy and join Dervla on her travels when possible.
