The Cretan Runner

Praise

“Psychoundakis was able to master challenges that would stagger an Olympic athlete: he could scramble snowy cliffs with a sixty-pound pack on his back, run fifty-plus miles through the night on a starvation diet of boiled hay, and outfox a Gestapo death squad that had him cornered.”
—Christopher McDougall

“Psychoundakis’s effortlessly poetic account reflected a passionate love of his homeland and its people, a geologist’s and botanist’s eye, chortling bemusement at the habits of the upper-class British agents, and deep comradeship with his fellow resistance fighters.”
—Simon Steyne, The Guardian

“There have been other memoirs of wartime Crete but those were visitors’ books. George’s story, as Leigh Fermor points out in the introduction, is unique.”
—Allison Pearson

“Any fresh volume on the subject would need to be exceptional. The Cretan Runner not only competes but transcends; it is not exceptional, it is unique.”
—The Times Literary Supplement

“The book has at once a calm of a race which takes it for granted that life is full of death, and the excitement of a fighter who wildly enjoys his own part of the dangerous business. It is full of jokes and full of pride.”
—Sunday Times

“But now Psychoundakis’s style seems the fresher, a scrappy, honest account of a temporary alliance with, and allegiance to, an external force in order to rid Crete of its occupiers. And with all the frustrations, disagreements, misunderstandings and damaged pride, as well as boozy parties and heroism, that entailed.”
—Vera Rules