Thubron's first travel book since Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award) describes the newly emergent countries of Central Asia, originally part of the Soviet Union. They contain the magical cities of Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent, the Kazakh steppes, the deserts of Karakum and the Pamir mountains. North of Iran and west of China, east of the Caspian Sea, this is an enormous land, as big as Western Europe, heart of the great Mongol Empire of Tamerlane, route of the silk roads and scene of Stalin's most devilish deportations.