Travel Light

Naomi Mitchison  - published August 2005

Now available as an ebook.

“A 78-year-old friend staying at my house picked up Travel Light, and a few hours later she said, ‘Oh, I wish I’d known there were books like this when I was younger!’ So, read it now—think of all those wasted years!”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts

The second novel in our Peapod Classics reprint line is Travel Light, the tale of a marvelous journey by the late Naomi Mitchison. We’ve been fans of both the author and this novel for years — although we never got to meet her. Back in June 2001 (long before this reprint line was ever imagined) Gavin J. Grant wrote a short piece for F&SF on Travel Light:

“A wonderful story that will transport you into Halla’s world where a basilisk might be met in the desert, heroes are taken to Valhalla by Valkyries, and a fortune might be made with a word to the right horse.”

This short and fabulous book transports the reader from a cave in the forest to a dragon’s lair to the wonders of early Constantinople. It’s dense and light, happy, deep, sad, amazing, and short enough that once it’s read all at once you’ll have time to read it again.

Read the new Introduction.

Read the first two chapters.

Reviews:

“A gem of a book.”
– Strange Horizons

“Every page is full of magic and wonder…. well worth seeking out.”
– Rambles

“Combines the best of Rowling and Pullman, being full of magic and fantasy with the hard edge of reality sharp at its edges.”
– The New Review/LauraHird.com

Advance Praise:

“Disarmingly familiar, like a memory only half-recalled. You will love this book.”
– Holly Black (Valiant, The Spiderwick Chronicles)

Praise for Naomi Mitchison:

“No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison.” – The Observer

“Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice.” –Publishers Weekly

“She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which … comes by grace.” – Times Literary Supplement

“One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century…. We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts

“Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things — water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
– Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation

About the Author:

Naomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland but traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

Publication history

First published in the UK by Faber and Faber in 1952 (cover scan on the right).

Reprinted: Virago Press, 1985; Penguin, 1987.

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