Alone and on foot, Nicholas Crane embarks on an extraordinary adventure- a seventeen-month journey along the chain of mountains which stretches across Europe from Cape Finisterre to Istanbul. With only his umbrella for company, he tramps across the Pyrenees, the Cevennes, the Alps, through the forested Carpathians and Balkans, surviving storms, a drought and one-hundred-year-old maps. Along the way he meets shepherds, cheesemakers, gunslingers and a prostitute who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. His account is both an astonishing tale of endurance and a celebration of the people and landscapes that exist on the periphery of the modern world.