"A remarkable memoir of adventure, courage and one woman’s inspirational embrace of life’s “what ifs” through an epic walk across Europe."
Engagingly honest and endlessly inspiring, Ursula Martin’s One Woman Walks Europe follows in the thrilling footsteps of her previous work, One Woman Walks Wales, as we follow in her footsteps throughout an incredible 5500-mile trek across Europe.
Suffused in the author’s resilience and irrepressible hunger for adventure (“I’ve always been one for the ‘what if…?’ I’m not so good at keeping my nose to the grindstone of a steady job, but I do come up with some brilliant flights of fancy. Where most people’s ‘what ifs?’ dissolve back into the bong water of their stoner years, somehow I kept doing mine”), I really couldn’t put it down.
Martin’s plan was to “walk from one edge of Europe to the other; starting in a country divided over joining the EU and finishing in a country divided over leaving it” i.e. a journey that begins with the author hitchhiking to Ukraine, and concludes with her return to Brexit-torn UK.
This she does through COVID lockdowns, and after surviving cancer, which leads Martin to describe this book, in part, as “a trauma story, because it’s about what drives me as much as what I achieved”.
Above all, One Woman Walks Europe is one of those rare reads that interweaves thrilling in-the-moment accounts of on-the-road experiences with personal fire, and stirring insights into humanity.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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