SHATTERED LANDS PB

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING FINALIST 2026A Best Book of the Year in the Financial Times The Week Spectator BBC History Magazine NPR History Today Waterstones and Daunts A sparkling debut by an outstanding young historian PETER FRANKOPAN Remarkable The prose is vivid the storytelling cinematic GUARDIANA history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it As recently as 1928 a vast swathe of Asia India Pakistan Bangladesh Burma Nepal Bhutan Yemen Oman the UAE Qatar Bahrain and Kuwait were bound together under a single imperial banner an entity known officially as the Indian Empire or more simply as the Raj It was the British Empire s crown jewel a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia home to a quarter of the world s population and encompassing the largest Hindu Muslim Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet Its people used the Indian rupee were issued passports stamped Indian Empire and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el Mandeb to the HimalayasAnd then in the space of just fifty years the Indian Empire shattered Five partitions tore it apart carving out new nations redrawing maps and leaving behi