In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella Maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women to travel Afghanistan's Northern Road, they fled
the storm brewing in Europe to seek a place untouched by what they considered to be Western neuroses.
�
The Afghan journey documented in All the Roads Are Open is one of the most important episodes of Schwarzenbach's turbulent life. Her incisive, lyrical essays offer a unique glimpse of
an Afghanistan already touched by the ��ateful laws known as progress,��a remote yet ��ensitive nerve centre of world politics��caught amid great powers in upheaval. In her writings,
Schwarzenbach conjures up the desolate beauty of landscapes both internal and external, reflecting on the longings and loneliness of travel as well as its grace.
�
Maillart's account of their trip, The Cruel Way, stands as a classic of travel literature, and, now available for the first time in English, Schwarzenbach's memoir rounds out the story
of the adventure.
�
Praise for the German Edition
���bove all, [Schwarzenbach's] discovery of the Orient was a personal one. But the author never loses sight of the historical and social context. . . . She shows no trace of colonialist
arrogance. In fact, the pieces also reflect the experience of crisis, the loss of confidence which, in that decade, seized the long-arrogant culture of the West.����i>S羹ddeutsche Zeitung
