Starting near the roof of the world on the Soviet Union's border with China, Geoffrey Moorhouse's journey through Central Asia winds across mountains, steppes and desert as well as the path of the retreating Red Army before reaching Tamburlaine's tomb in Samarakand. The sequel to his award winning To the Frontier, Apples in the Snow is both a dramatic history of this wild region and an absorbing portrait of its present.

'A beautifully written account ... Moorhouse is one of the great travellers: everywhere attuned to past and present, to the uneasiness and muted discords of the people about him, to the mundane, the ridiculous and the extraordinary beauties of Central Asia.' Guardian