Alice Albinia

The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche.

From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae.

Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.

The Indus rises in Tibet, flows west across India, and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion.

Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five thousand years of history redolent with contemporary importance.