Overview

For centuries the city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1833 it was discovered in Afghanistan by the unlikeliest person imaginable: Charles Masson, deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist, spy, one of the most respected scholars in Asia, and the greatest of nineteenth-century travelers. On the way into one of history's most extraordinary stories, he would take tea with kings, travel with holy men and become the master of a hundred disguises; he would see things no westerner had glimpsed before and few have glimpsed since. He would spy for the East India Company and be suspected of spying for Russia at the same time, for this was the era of the Great Game, when imperial powers confronted each other in these staggeringly beautiful lands. Masson discovered tens of thousands of pieces of Afghan history, including the 2,000-year-old Bimaran golden casket, which has upon it the earliest known face of the Buddha. He would be offered his own kingdom; he would change the world, and the world would destroy him. This is a wild journey through nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan, with impeccably researched storytelling that shows us a world of espionage and dreamers, ne'er-do-wells and opportunists, extreme violence both personal and military, and boundless hope.

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Edmund Richardson is associate professor of classics at Durham University, UK. He has published Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity and was named one of the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers in 2016. British-born Julian Elfer is an award-winning New York City-based actor and audiobook narrator with over 100 titles to his credit. Hailed by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for his lead performance in the Mint Theatre Company's A Day by the Sea, Julian brings a unique facility for characterization in fiction and an empathy for the personalities and events of the past.

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