Dervla Murphy: 22 books

In 1985, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in two of Britian’s most turbulent multiracial communities – the Asian community of Manningham in Bradford and the Caribbean community of Handsworth in Birmingham – with the intention of seeing firsthand the harsh realities of social deprivation. While...

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to...

As Dervla Murphy crisscrossed the Balkans in a series of bicycle journeys towards the beginning and end of the 1990s, she recorded the griefs and confusions of the ordinary people, many of whom had showed extraordinary courage and resilience during that terrible ‘decade of decay’ and whose voices...

At the height of The Troubles, Dervla Murphy cycled to Northern Ireland to try to understand the situation by speaking to people on either side of the divide. She also sought to interrogate her own opinions and emotions. As an Irishwoman and traveller who had only ever spent thirty-six hours of her...

With her fourteen-year-old daughter Rachel, Dervla Murphy journeyed across the unique island of Madagascar, neither part of Africa, its nearest neighbour, nor part of Asia, the ancestral home the Malagasy people who live there. Beginning at Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, they travelled south...

Laos, caught in the middle of the Vietnam War, is one of the most heavily bombed countries in world history. It’s where Dervla Murphy’s ‘inner-click’ sends her in 1997, when the country had just opened its borders to the West. Her three-month trek is threatened by torn ligaments in her foot,...

Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of her most recent journeys into Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with...

The Waiting Land is an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman in the spring of 1965. The third in a series of books tracing Dervla's involvement with the self-sufficient mountain cultures of the Himalayas, she is lured by the chance to work again with Tibetan refugees...