When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and soon—inspired by her correspondence with a Sikh pen pal—she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off, and this astonishing book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through the Balkans, Iran, Afghanistan and—over the Himalayas—into Pakistan and India. A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantities, floods and robbery, using her .25 pistol on starving wolves and to scare off predatory men, and relying on the generosity of nomads, she not only finished her epic journey, but also pioneered a form of adventure travel that has inspired generations. Over half a century after it was first published, Full Tilt remains a hugely popular classic of travel writing.

About the Author
Dervla Murphy was born in Ireland in 1931, to a family involved in the Irish Republican movement. She was educated at the Ursuline Convent in Waterford until she was fourteen, when she left to keep house for her father and to nurse her mother who had been invalided by arthritis. Dervla did this for sixteen years with occasional breaks bicycling across Europe. Her mother’s death left her free to go farther afield and in 1963 she cycled to India. Here she worked with Tibetan refugee children before returning home after a year to write her first two books. Dervla’s first book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, was published in 1965. Over twenty other titles have followed. Dervla has won worldwide praise for her writing and has been described as a ‘travel legend’ and ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’. Now in her eighties, she continues to travel around the world and remains passionate about politics, conservation, bicycling and beer.