Corsair Country
FIELDING, Xan
The Diary of a Journey along the Barbary Coast. [Travel Book Club edition].
Published: Travel Book Club, [1959]
Stock code: 18524
Price: £30.00
8vo., First Edition thus; original pale blue cloth, backstrip lettered in black, covers lightly age-soiled else a very good, clean copy.
Published a year after the first edition. Evocative travel diary. Fielding (1918-1991) was one of the first SOE agents (with Paddy Leigh Fermor and Dick Barnes) to be landed in Crete where he spent two years or so in a precarious game of hide and seek with the occupying Germans. Arrested in France later in the war, he was saved from execution by the Polish SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek. In post-war years a close friend of Lawrence Durrell, Fielding developed a career as writer and translator, achieving acclaim for his translation of 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'. In common with all TBC editions, this issue omits the plates and map present in the original.