A Booklist "Top 10 History Book of 2022" The first true people's history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world's largest democracy and second most populous country. It is also the site of the world's biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its people--especially those living in disputed border regions. Suchitra Vijayan traveled India's vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries. In this stunning work of narrative reportage--featuring over 40 original photographs--we hear from those whose stories are never told: from children playing a cricket match in no-man's-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country we've long been missing.

A probing, ground-level investigation of illegal immigration and the people on both sides of the battle to secure the U.S.–Mexico border With illegal immigration burning as a contentious issue in American politics, Reuters reporter Tim Gaynor went into the underbelly of the border and to the heart of illegal immigration: along the 45-mile trek down the illegal alien "superhighway." Through scorpion-strewn trails with Mexican migrants and drug smugglers, he met up with a legendary group of Native American trackers called the Shadow Wolves, and traveled through the extensive network of tunnels, including the "Great Tunnel" from Tijuana to Otay Mesa, California. Along the way, Gaynor also meets Minutemen and exposes corruption among the Border Patrol agents who exchange sex or money for helping smugglers. The issue of illegal immigration has a complexity beyond any of the political rhetoric. Combining top-notch investigative journalism with a narrative style that delves into the human condition, Gaynor reveals the day-to-day realities on both sides of "the line."

A few bloody months in South Asia during the summer of 1947 explain the world that troubles us today.

One of Time Magazine’s Sixteen Best True Crime Books of All Time A crusading Mexican-American journalist searches for justice and hope in an increasingly violent Mexico In the last decade, more than 100,000 people have been killed or disappeared in the Mexican drug war, and drug trafficking there is a multibillion-dollar business. In a country where the powerful are rarely scrutinized, noted Mexican-American journalist Alfredo Corchado refuses to shrink from reporting on government corruption, murders in Juárez, or the ruthless drug cartels of Mexico. One night, Corchado received a tip that he could be the next target of the Zetas, a violent paramilitary group—and that he had twenty-four hours to find out if the threat was true. Midnight in Mexico is the story of one man’s quest to report the truth of his country—as he races to save his own life.

Istanbul has long been a place where stories and histories collide, where perception is as potent as fact. From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names--Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul -- resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was the very center of the world, known simply as "The City," but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city, but a global story. In this epic new biography, Hughes takes us on a dazzling historical journey from the Neolithic to the present, through the many incarnations of one of the world's greatest cities--exploring the ways that Istanbul's influence has spun out to shape the wider world. Hughes investigates what it takes to make a city and tells the story not just of emperors, viziers, caliphs, and sultans, but of the poor and the voiceless, of the women and men whose aspirations and dreams have continuously reinvented Istanbul. Written with energy and animation, award-winning historian Bettany Hughes deftly guides readers through Istanbul's rich layers of history. Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, this captivating portrait of the momentous life of Istanbul is visceral, immediate, and authoritative -- narrative history at its finest.

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon’s translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.

A Booklist "Top 10 History Book of 2022" The first true people's history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world's largest democracy and second most populous country. It is also the site of the world's biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its people--especially those living in disputed border regions. Suchitra Vijayan traveled India's vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries. In this stunning work of narrative reportage--featuring over 40 original photographs--we hear from those whose stories are never told: from children playing a cricket match in no-man's-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country we've long been missing.