One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains and flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. It has been worshipped as a god, used as a tool of imperial expansion, and today is the cement of Pakistan's fractious union. Alice Albinia follows the river upstream, through two thousand miles of geography and back to a time five thousand years ago when a string of sophisticated cities grew on its banks. 'œThis turbulent history, entwined with a superlative travel narrative' ( The Guardian ) leads us from the ruins of elaborate metropolises, to the bitter divisions of today. Like Rory Stewart's The Places In Between , Empires of the Indus is an engrossing personal journey and a deeply moving portrait of a river and its people.