Peter Frankopan Bundle (2 in 1)

The sun is setting on the Western world. Slowly but surely, the direction in which the world spins has reversed: where for the last five centuries the globe turned westwards on its axis, it now turns to the east.

For centuries, fame and fortune was to be found in the west in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of adventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture and is shaping the modern world.

This region, the true centre of the earth, is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet this is where civilization itself began, where the world's great religions were born and took root. The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas, goods, disease and death. This was where empires were won and where they were lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia. The Silk Roads are rising again.

A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is an important account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east.

Climate change is real. There is no question that global warming will have a dramatic impact on a significant part of the world's population. Scientific models predicting famine, large-scale migration and the failure and collapse of cities are right to do so - because history is filled with cases where this is precisely what happened.

In Climate Change and the Making of History, acclaimed historian Peter Frankopan draws on new scientific archives to reveal how environmental change has shaped our world: from the fall of the Ming dynasty in China, to the emergence of Viking society, to the collapse of Angkor. Ranging from the beginning of recorded history to the present today, he explores how religions and language can trace their evolution to climate change, and demonstrates that contemporary concerns about pollution, damage and altering climatic patterns are nothing new; rather, they follow in a long tradition of humankind's efforts to make sense of and live within the natural world.

By turns revolutionary and revelatory, invigorating and incisive, Climate Change and the Making of History is a manifesto for human action, rooted in the lessons offered up by our past.