Artemis Cooper’s new biography of the writer, adventurer, and bon vivant Patrick Leigh Fermor is the first to tell the full story of his truly remarkable life. Cooper previously edited a selection of his short writings, and knew the writer from childhood; her biography is based on years of interviews with Leigh Fermor and his circle, and helps to sort the man from the myth he did so much himself to create. For those unfamiliar with his work, here are our five reasons to read Patrick Leigh Fermor's work -- and his life story.

He describes a vanished world.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paddy to his many friends, was born in the middle of World War I to parents who belonged to the British ruling class in India. For the first four years of his life, because of the practical dangers of making the long voyage out from England with his mother and sister, young Paddy was raised by a farming family, who let him run wild in what he later remembered as an interlude of “complete and unalloyed bliss.” In his autobiographical writing, he powerfully evokes the emotions and sensations of early childhood; he’s an autobiographer who can all but touch the past running under the present, and imagine himself back into the mind and body of his younger self. The cold really bites and the fireplace really warms.

He was a born rebel.
Perhaps because he spent these formative years free from any parental authority, Paddy grew up into a boy who would submit to no master. He was kicked out of a string of schools, sent to psychiatrists, and eventually the renowned King’s School, Canterbury, expelled him for holding hands with the greengrocer’s daughter, who was six years older and, as he put it, “a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty.” Thus freed from the constraints of formal education, but still restless and reckless, the eighteen-year-old Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe to Constantinople -- a romantically pointless and foolhardy quest in the early 1930s, just as Hitler was rising to power. This is the story told in his two best-known books: A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, which took him more than half a century to complete -- and they only get him as far as Romania. The final volume will be published next spring as The Broken Road, assembled from the book and notes he left uncompleted at his death.

Dirk Bogarde played him in the movie.
As it turned out, the Nazis had more to fear from Patrick Leigh Fermor than the other way around: During World War Two he lived on the occupied Greek island of Crete and joined the local resistance, eventually leading the raid that captured the German general in charge. The raiders spent two weeks hiding out while search parties hunted them, making their way up and over Zeus’s sacred Mount Ida, before delivering the general into the hands of the Allies. When Leigh Fermor was able to complete an ode by Horace that his captive was reciting, he realized that they shared a common cultural heritage and deep love of the classics -- “We had both drunk at the same fountains long before.” In 1957 the British directors Powell and Pressburger made the capture into the film "Ill Met By Moonlight" -- with Dirk Bogarde horribly miscast, in the eyes of most of Paddy’s friends, as the hero.

He remained devoted to Greece -- and a hero to travel writers.
After the war, Leigh Fermor continued to travel, but was based in Greece in the house he built with his photographer wife, Joan Raynor. His books Mani and Roumeli tell the story of his travels in the Southern Peloponnese and northern Greece, in which his observations and experiences are supported by a wealth of historical and cultural knowledge, delivered in a spirit of passionate enthusiasm. That combination of energy and erudition inspired many of our greatest travel writers, from Jan Morris to William Dalrymple and Bruce Chatwin -- whose ashes are scattered on the grounds of Leigh Fermor’s Greek villa.

His writing is as flamboyant as his life.
Leigh Fermor found writing a struggle, and agonized over the smallest details, which slowed down his output to a crawl. The frontispiece of Artemis Cooper’s biography reproduces two pages from the manuscript of A Time of Gifts: an impossibly complex network of annotations, erasures, and rewritings, which his publisher would whip out whenever anyone asked when the next book was coming out. As a result, his prose is often as lyrical as poetry, densely packed with allusion, vividly evocative of places, people, sights, sounds, and tastes, and suffused with a rare sense of joy in living.