THE NEW SILK ROADS

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE WORLD

PETER FRANKOPAN

Bloomsbury, 336pp, £14.99

‘We are living through a transformation and a shift that is epochal in its scale and character,’ says Frankopan, whose 2015 bestseller, The Silk Roads, as Roger Boyes reminded us in the Times, ‘put the smells, sounds and cultural ties back into a sprawling region that is increasingly described as Eurasia, that land that takes in China, central Asia, the Middle East, even Europe’. This sequel ‘is alarmingly up-to-date, referring to political events in the summer of 2018. This scramble for immediacy robs it of the charm of the original book. Little travel seems to have been involved; the writing is a bit hectic. However, Frankopan has a serious purpose: to demonstrate that while the West is fragmenting and losing its bearings, there is a large chunk of the globe that is busily restoring historical and cultural links, transforming itself into a coherent counterweight.’ The Beijing correspondent of the

Irish Times, Clifford Coonan, found Frankopan’s sequel ‘absorbing’ and also ‘a reminder of how the pace of the news cycle has become dizzying’. For Justin Marozzi, in the Evening

Standard, this new book is ‘a journalistic résumé of world affairs over the past three years’, with the Belt and Road initiative as its narrative spine. ‘China describes it as “win-win”. Others see it as imposing strangulating levels of debt on independent states and thereby turning them into Chinese clients. Either way, it dwarfs anything coming from the western world – and that is Frankopan’s point.’