The Oil Road

“An elegantly written travel book about a pipeline … A distinctive blend of travelogue, reportage and history.”—Financial Times

“Inspirational in the proper sense.”—Guardian

“A lovingly crafted narrative, a rich tapestry of first-hand anecdote and historical reconstruction.”—Independent

“Elegant … verges on the psychogeographical … The human stories behind the pipeline’s construction.”—Literary Review

“Opens the lid on the often-shady energy economy, weaving absorbing travel reportage into powerful investigative journalism.”—Time Out Book of the Week

“Seamlessly weaves an engaging personal story into the current geopolitics of oil aggression and the volatile recent history of the region.”—Red Pepper

“Part-travelogue, part-reportage, The Oil Road is a powerful … account of how a valuable natural resource can ruin the lives of ordinary people … This is no dry historiography.”—Sunday Business Post

“Beautifully written as well as formidably well-informed … A pleasure to read.”—Neal Ascherson, Black Sea

“The Oil Road is an inspiring act of political cartography. It makes chastisingly visible the means by which we blithely consume ‘the geology of elsewhere.’”—Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways



“Well researched and written with empathy, integrity and imagination. It is timely and much needed.” Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

“This book is so masterful, so authortatively researched and so elegantly written, that it suceeds in distilling a complex and changing ‘Carbon Web’ of engineering companies, legal firms, and financiers, into an intimate and engaging personal story.”—Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed