This remarkable book, bringing together memoir, travel writing, how-to manual and informal anthropology, largely unfolds in Anissari, a village in western Crete. Devastated by the death of his mother, MacLean fled there with little relevant experience and only limited, "lunatic" Greek, to build a plane on the island of Daedalus and Icarus, and fly it himself  thereby, he explains, remaking and freeing himself, and reconnecting with the ancient and divine. The process of assembling the plane is recounted in detail, giving the book an unusual combination of technical nitty-gritty and ideas of transcendence that recalls the 70s bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But it's also been rightly acclaimed as a travel writing classic; Jan Morris and Colin Thubron are among MacLean's admirers, and Robert Macfarlane's insightful introduction to this reissue places the book in a tradition stretching from Marco Polo to Bruce Chatwin, of unreliably recalled "wonder-voyages" in which "the actual and the miraculous rub shoulders".