Albania borders Greece to the south, Montenegro to the north,
Macedonia and Kosovo to the east and the Adriatic to the west. The
land of King Zog and Enver Hoxha, the communist who ruled from 1946
to 1985, is one of great beauty with 'massive, gaunt and severe'
mountains, and of immense terror: 'One in every three was a spy in
the Hoxha years. You could not even trust your wife not to denounce
you.' Carver first comments upon the towns and countryside
ofAlbania's southern province, Toskeria, and then travels through
the more remote northern province, Ghegeria. There he meets an Ali
Rashid, who remembers the last British to be in the area 50 years
before the liaison officers who fought the German occupation during
World War II. (Kirkus UK)
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 the Second World War, 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. In Tirana he experiences the contrasting side to life in Albania when he finds himself in the diplomatic set, inadvertantly consorting with Balkan highlife and involved with eccentrics worthy of an Evelyn Waugh novel.High adventure, danger and comedy alike are recounted in this sharp and spirited narrative, a highly original experience of a mysterious mountain land.
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