City of Djinns

Description

As Dalrymple's first book, "In Xanadu", traversed thousands of miles, now he traverses thousands of years. In the course of 12 months in Delhi, he peels back the successive encrusting layers of history, using both material and human remains of each of the eight cities of Delhi, interlacing innumerable stories with the present and ending with the Delhi creation myth contained in the great Indian epic "The Mahabharata".

William Dalrymple's first book, In Xanadu, won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award. His third, From the Holy Mountain, won the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award and was shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award. His fourth, The Age of Kali, was published in November 1998. He is the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has recently written and presented a six-part series on the buildings of the Raj for Channel 4.

'Delightful... Surely one of the funniest books about India' Times Literary Supplement 'Scholarly and marvellously entertaining... a considerable feat' Dervla Murphy, Spectator 'Dalrymple has pulled it off again' Jan Morris, Independent