PLACES IN BETWEEN

This international bestseller is a vivid account of a death-defying walk across war-torn Afghanistan, a country scarred by a present and a past of violence and death. Weaving history, culture and his own harrowing experiences, Rory Stewart begins his journey accompanied by three members of the security service of the new Afghan Government. Stewart was left to his own devices, armed with only a pole tipped with metal at both ends, a kit bag containing a change of clothes, medication, US survival food, incomplete maps, photographs of his family and letters of introduction from village leaders which were both confiscated and freshly given to him along the way. Early in his journey he is persuaded to take a dog along with him, an aging mastiff with most of its teeth knocked out of his head which he appropriately names Babur. This moving account of Stewart's walk across Afghanistan in January 2002 was immediately hailed as a classic. Caught between hostile nations, warring factions and in competing ideologies, at the time Afghanistan was in turmoil following the US invasion, he travelled entirely on foot and followed the inaccessible mountainous route once taken by the Mogul Emperor Babur the Great. Stewart was nearly defeated by the extreme, hostile conditions, and only with the help of an unexpected companion and the generosity of people he met on the way did he survive to report back with unique insight on a region closed to the world by 24 years of war. What leaps out of the pages is Stewart's great knowledge of the region and his grasp of tribal loyalties and divisions and how poverty is often allied with geography and history. He even discovers what had been the tallest minaret in the world at the time of its construction, rising to 200 feet, a slim column of intricately carved terracotta set with a line of turquoise tiles as we read of the loss of the archaeology of the Minaret of Jam, high in the Afghan Mountains. Of course we know now that much of Afghanistan's cultural heritage had been removed or destroyed, the Kabul Museum looted, and the Bamiyan Buddhas dynamited by the Taliban. But the dogged spirit of the country is mirrored by Stewart and his heroic canine companion who trudged through snow and ice to Kabul. 360 page paperback, illustrated.