A poetic meditation on life and death, by one of the most renowned and respected film-makers and intellectuals of our time.

In November 1974, when Werner Herzog was told that his mentor Lotte Eisner, the film-maker and critic, was dying in Paris, he set off to walk there from Munich, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Along the way he recorded what he saw, how he felt, and what he experienced, from the physical discomfort of the journey to moments of rapture. It is a remarkable narrative part pilgrimage, part meditation, and a confrontation between a great German Romantic imagination and the contemporary world. This edition of the book is being published for the first time as a classic piece of proto-psychogeography, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the legendary directors walk.

Werner Herzog was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and studied History and German Literature in Munich and Pittsburgh. He made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than fifty feature- and documentary films, such as AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972), NOSFERATU (1978), FITZCARRALDO (1982), LESSONS OF DARKNESS (1992), LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY (1997), MY BEST FIEND (1999), INVINCIBLE (2000), GRIZZLY MAN (2005), ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007) or CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2011). Werner Herzog has published more than a dozen books of prose, and directed as many operas. Werner Herzog lives in Munich and Los Angeles.

'Herzog's existential journey through a hostile winter landscape is one of the great modern pilgrimages - a record of physical suffering, of hallucination and ecstatic revelation, of portents and animals, of the wreckage of history and myth. Of Walking in Ice has the eerie power of the best fairytales. It hits you with the force of dreams and leaves you with the taste of snow-filled air'

Helen MacDonald, author H is for Hawk, winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction