The author recounts her adventures in Cameroon.Travelling with her daughter and accompanied by a Cameroonian horse they overcome floods, malaria, marriage proposals from tribal chiefs, and stray into a restricted zone around Lake Nyos, where a cloud of volcanic gas had recently killed over 2,000 villagers. The author also wrote Muddling Through in Madagascar, On a Shoestring to Coorg and The Waiting Land.

In Where the Indus is Young , Dervla Murphy's indomitable will is matched by that of four-footed Hallam and her six-year-old daughter Rachel. Together they make a mockery of fear, trekking through the awe-inspiring Karakorum mountains not only in the heart of winter, but close to Pakistan's disputed border with Kashmir. They work their way up beside the perilous gorge carved through the mountains by the Indus, lodging with locals and eating, sleeping and bargaining with the Balts, who farm one of the remotest regions on earth. Despite the hardship, Dervla never forgets the point of travel, retaining enthusiasm for her magnificent surroundings and using her sense of humour to bring out the best in her hosts, who are often locked into the melancholic mood of mid-winter.

After her epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle in 1963, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in the life of the sub-continent, working for six months in an orphanage for Tibetan children in Northern India. She fell in love with the 'Tiblets' - the cheerful, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children of the new Tibet-in-exile - but she also managed to explore India's Tibetan frontier, leaving the reader panting in her wake. Alongside her enchantment, Dervla became a perceptive witness to the realities of aid work: the corruption, smug piety and power struggles of the bureaucrats, and the dangerous, long-term side effects on the recipients - cultural enfeeblement and dependency. Tibetan Foothold not only confirmed Dervla's status as a traveller, but also revealed her to be a truly independent voice and an acute observer of politics and society.

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 Pakistan and India.A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantities, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable.

Inspired by childhood stories of Prester John and the Queen of Sheba, in 1966 Dervla Murphy bought Jock, an amiable pack-mule, and set off to trek across the highlands of this awesome but troubled land. She wandered south from the Red Sea shore to Sheba's Aksum and up onto the icy roof of Africa, the Semien mountains. From there she descended to the ruined palaces of Gondar and skirted the northern shore of Lake Tana before crossing the drought-afflicted high ranges to Lalibela. Having exchanged the exhausted Jock (named after her publisher) for an uncooperative donkey, Dervla completed her journey to Addis Ababa. The real achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or a mountainous one-thousand-mile trail, but rather Dervla's growing affection for and understanding of another race.

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self – strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first – her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death. Here lie the roots of Dervla's gift for friendship, her love of writing, her curiosity, her hatred of cant, her hardiness and her desire to travel. Bicycling fifty miles in a day at the age of eleven, alone, it seems only natural that her first major journey should have been to cycle to India.

Travel writing on exotic India.From Bombay to the hippy beaches of Goa and on to the tropical trip of India, travelling by boat and bus, staying in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, Dervla Murphy and her five-year-old daughter explored the south. En route they fell in love with the tiny mountain paradise of Coorg, whose landscapes and people form the focus of a wonderfully evocative travel diary. This is an account of their journey. The author also wrote In Cameroon with Egbert, The Waiting Land and Muddling through in Madagascar.

Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Through reported conversations she creates a vivid picture of life in this coastal fragment of self-governing Palestine. Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with the rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enjoyment of family life. During her month by the sea, Dervla develops an acute eye for the way in which isolation has shaped this society. Time and again she meets men who have returned to the Strip as an act of presence. Yet the mosque is often their only daily activity, as difficulties obtaining supplies mean few opportunities for creative work. This acts as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamist Qassam brigades and a pressure cooker for the creation of domestic tyrants. In this situation,...

Take a three-generation family holiday in Cuba in the company of Dervla Murphy, her daughter and three young granddaughters and you have a Swallows-and-Amazons-like adventure in the Caribbean as they trek into the hills and along the coast as a family, camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars and relishing the ubiquitous Cuban hospitality. But this is no more than the joyful start of a fully-fledged quest to understand the unique society created by the Cuban Revolution. For Dervla returns alone to explore the mountains, coastal swamps and decaying cities, investigating the experience of modern Cuba with her particular, candid curiosity. Through her own research and through conversations with Fidelistas and their critics alike, The Island That Dared builds a complex picture of a people struggling to retain their identity in the face of the insistent hostility of the government of the United States.

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 - this time a group of five hundred lodged in tents in the remote Pokhara valley. Once established in Kathmandu, and later at home in a tiny, vermin-infested room above a stall in a Nepalese bazaar, she falls under the spell of this ancient land, poised between East and West, between China and India, between Buddhism and Hinduism, yet true to its own distinct civilization. Dervla's understanding of the roots of the Nepalese past, and her own stamina, culminate in an epic trek into the remote Langtang region on the border with Tibet.