Christopher Robbins

Robbins combines understated scholarship with a dry humour and writes with affection about his experiences of travelling to the heart of the real Kazakhstan" - Sunday Telegraph.

Kazakhstan is the size of Western Europe but so little known that few people can find it on a map. It was closed to travel by the Tsars and sealed tight by the Soviets. Cosmonauts were sent into space from here, Gulags built and nuclear weapons tested. Today, against all the odds, it is an oil- and mineral-rich independent state that has no enemies.

Christopher Robbins criss-crosses a Wild East full of surreal characters: he finds Eminem by a shrinking Aral Sea, hears the Kazakh John Lennon play in a dusty desert town, joins nomads hunting with eagles, eats sheep's heads and sushi with the President - and visits some of the most beauituful, unspoilt places on earth.