NEW DELHI, April 1, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --
In the spring of 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne.
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On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The first Anglo-Afghan war ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the nineteenth century: an entire army of the then most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat and utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen.
Return of a King is the definitive analysis of the first Afghan War, told through the lives of unforgettable characters on all sides and using for the first time contemporary Afghan accounts of the conflict. Prize-winning and best-selling historian William Dalrymple's masterful retelling of Britain's greatest imperial disaster is a powerful and important parable of colonial ambition and cultural collision, folly and hubris, for our times.
Return of a King was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, 2013, and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2014.
Reviews
"Magnificent… Compulsive reading" - The Guardian
"Of Dalrymple's recent works, Return of a King is perhaps the most directly relevant to the present day" - The Observer
"This is the book he was born to write" - Economist
"A master storyteller…Dalrymple tells the back story of the Great Game in a narrative that matches the best of historical fiction" - India Today
"A researcher par excellence… A writer of exceptional dexterity" - Business Standard
"Arguably the most important work in Dalrymple's impressive oeuvre" - Sunday Guardian
About the author
William Dalrymple is the best-selling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, The Age of Kali, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, and, most recently, Nine Lives. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d'Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone India Crossword Award and has three times been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
In 2012 he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.
About Bloomsbury India
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Bloomsbury India's authors include the international best-selling writers J K Rowling, Khaled Hosseini and Elizabeth Gilbert; Booker Prize winners Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson; Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer; and the best-selling author of inspirational books in India, Shiv Khera.
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