The Silk Road is a fabled route that has been shaped by some of the most extraordinary tracts of land on this planet. A vast region separating China from the Mediterranean, it rates not only as a millennia-old trade route but also as one of the least hospitable on Earth - a succession of hostile deserts and towering mountain ranges, a harsh terrain of howling winds, searing heat and blistering cold.

This book weaves together personal experience of almost ridiculous endurance - sleeping on steaming rocks in the middle of a sub-zero desert, courting altitude sickness in the otherwise meditative Himalaya, risking the anthrax spores of Voz Island's post-Stalinist wasteland - with the bigger picture of our planet's new 'lost worlds' and their peoples, this is brilliant adventure writing from a man who has dared to go places that often history has feared to tread.