Rory Stewart served in the UK Cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development, and before that as Prisons Minister, Minister for Africa, Minister for Development, Environment Minister and Chair of the Defence Committee. He ran against Boris Johnson for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2019. Earlier in his career he was briefly in the British Army, before serving as a diplomat in Indonesia, the Balkans and Iraq, establishing and running a charity in Afghanistan, and holding a chair at Harvard University. His other books include Occupational Hazards, The Marches and Politics on the Edge, which was an instant Sunday Times bestseller. Stewart is now the president of the non-profit organization GiveDirectly, a visiting fellow at Yale's Jackson School and the co-host, with Alastair Campbell, of the UK's leading podcast The Rest is Politics. He tweets at @RoryStewartUK.
This is traveling at its hardest and travel-writing at its best -- David Gilmour With a deft, at time poetic vividness, he describes an awesome landscape, scarred by a present and a past of violence and death . . . His encounters with Afghans are tragic, touching and terrifying * Daily Telegraph * [Stewart] must have balls of steel, but he writes like and angel all the same -- Giles Foden This evocative book feels like a long lost relic of the great age of exploration * Guardian * An astonishing achievement: a unique journey of great courage -- Colin Thubron Wise, funny and marvelously humane -- Michael Ignatieff An insight into the country that few could match * New Statesman * Thank goodness for brave people doing crazy things and for a writer in the tradition of Thesiger and Thubron * Spectator *