The Places In Between

Traces the author's 2002 journey by foot across Afghanistan, during which he survived the harsh elements through the kindness of tribal elders, teen soldiers, Taliban commanders, and foreign-aid workers whose stories he collected along his way. By the author of The Prince of the Marshes. Original. 20,000 first printing.

An account of a death-defying walk through Afghanistan. Rory Stewart's sparsely poetic account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002 has been hailed as a modern classic of travel writing.

A New York Times Bestseller This acccount of a 36-day walk across Afghanistan, starting just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, is “stupendous...an instant travel classic” (Entertainment Weekly). In January 2002, Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan, surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion—a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters—by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny—Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

Rory Stewart's sparsely poetic and highly acclaimed account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002 has been hailed as a modern classic of travel writing. Travelling entirely on foot and following the inaccessible, mountainous route, Stewart was nearly defeated by the hostile conditions. With the help of an unexpected companion and the generosity of the people he met on the way, however, he survived to report back on a region closed to the world by twenty-four years of war...

"There is a map you decide to call a book. A book of the territories youÕve traveled. A map is a meaning you hold against the unknowing. The places you speak in many directions." For Diane Glancy, there are books that you open like a map. In-between Places is such a book: a collection of eleven essays unified by a common concern with landscape and its relation both to our spiritual life and to the craft of writing. Taking readers on a trip to New Mexico, a voyage across the sea of middle America, even a journey to China, Glancy has crafted a sustained meditation on the nature and workings of language, stories, and poems; on travel and motion as metaphors for life and literature; and on the relationships between Native American and Judeo-Christian ways of thinking and being in the world. Reflecting on strip mines in Missouri ("as long as there is anything left to take, human industry will take it") and hog barns in Iowa (writing about them from the hogs' perspective), Glancy speaks in the margins of cross-cultural issues and from the places in-between as she explores the middle ground between places that we handle with the potholder of language. She leaves in her wake a dance of words and the structures left after the collision of cultures. A writer who has often examined her native heritage, Glancy also asks here what it means to be part white. "What does whiteness look like viewed from the other, especially when that other is also within oneself?" And in considering the legacy of Christianity, she ponders "how it is when the Holy Ghost enters your life like a brother-in-law you know is going to be there a while." Insightful and provocative, In-between Places is a book for anyone interested in a sense of place and in the relationship between religion and our stance toward nature. It is also a book for anyone who loves thoughtful writing and wishes to learn from a modern master of language.

An adventurous diplomat’s “engrossing and often darkly humorous” memoir of working with Iraqis after the fall of Saddam Hussein(Publishers Weekly). In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat who had recently completed an epic walk from Turkey to Bangladesh, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war. The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart’s year. As a participant he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, it amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.

A beautiful, wordless graphic novel about feeling lost . . . and trying to get back to the place where you think you should be. What happens when you're trapped in the darkness, in emotional pain and turmoil? How can you make your way through that anguish and find joy again? In wordless black-and-white illustrations, John Cei Douglas empathetically shows the struggle to communicate how things feel when we get lost, and the wrenching loneliness that comes with mental-health struggles. His poignant images show a woman, sad and alone, as she drifts powerlessly across a vast and empty universe . . . till she finds her way home. A quietly beautiful meditation on the seemingly endless paths we wander just to be able to return to where we think we should be, All the Places in Between is a comforting reminder that you're not alone on your journey.

'This is travel writing at its best.' Katherine Norbury, Observer An Observer Book of the Year His father Brian taught Rory Stewart how to walk, and walked with him on journeys from Iran to Malaysia. Now they have chosen to do their final walk together along 'the Marches' - the frontier that divides their two countries, Scotland and England. Brian, a ninety-year-old former colonial official and intelligence officer, arrives in Newcastle from Scotland dressed in tartan and carrying a draft of his new book You Know More Chinese Than You Think. Rory comes from his home in the Lake District, carrying a Punjabi fighting stick which he used when walking across Afghanistan. On their six-hundred-mile, thirty-day journey - with Rory on foot, and his father 'ambushing' him by car - the pair relive Scottish dances, reflect on Burmese honey-bears, and on the loss of human presence in the British landscape. On mountain ridges and in housing estates they uncover a forgotten country crushed between England and Scotland: the Middleland. They cross upland valleys which once held forgotten peoples and languages - still preserved in sixth-century lullabies and sixteenth-century ballads. The surreal tragedy of Hadrian's Wall forces them to re-evaluate their own experiences in the Iraq and Vietnam wars. The wild places of the uplands reveal abandoned monasteries, border castles, secret military test sites and newly created wetlands. They discover unsettling modern lives, lodged in an ancient land. Their odyssey develops into a history of nationhood, an anatomy of the landscape, a chronicle of contemporary Britain and an exuberant encounter between a father and a son. And as the journey deepens, and the end approaches, Brian and Rory fight to match, step by step, modern voices, nationalisms and contemporary settlements to the natural beauty of the Marches, and a fierce absorption in tradition in their own unconventional lives.