RAVE REVIEW for my book Shattered Lands in the Guardian!

“What makes Shattered Lands remarkable is not just the breadth of its archival reach or the linguistic range of its interviews (from Bengali to Burmese, Urdu to Konyak), but the way it reframes south Asia’s history through the lens of disintegration...

Shattered Lands speaks powerfully to our present moment. At a time of widespread historical amnesia – when revisionist governments across south Asia are remaking textbooks and erasing inconvenient truths – this book reminds us how recent, contested and fragile these dividing lines are.

The prose is vivid, the storytelling cinematic, and Dalrymple draws together forgotten archives from Aden to Assam. Above all, there is a refusal to mythologise, and instead a clear-eyed history that lays bare the possibilities foreclosed by the region’s fragmentation."