‘Slowly Down the Ganges’ is seen as a vintage Newby masterpiece, alongside ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ and ‘Love and War in the Apennines’. Told with Newby's self-deprecating humour and wry attention to detail, this is a classic of the genre and a window into an enchanting piece of history.

Travel along the shores of the Ganges and glimpse the past and future of the people who live there.

Adopted from India when she was six and raised in Spain, the author takes a heart-wrenching trip back to India as an adult to uncover her roots and discover a sister she never knew.

Beyond the dense urbanism of Mumbai (Bombay) or the IT centers of Bangalore and Hyderabad lies the Ganges River basin--today home to over one-quarter of India's billion-plus population--a space historically defined by a mythological constellation of terrestrial sites imbued with celestial significance. Not only is it one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, but it also undergoes dramatic physical changes with the onslaught of the wet monsoon, where over one-meter of rainfall occurs in the span of three months. This book focuses on the intersection of these two observations. It is an atlas of built and unbuilt projects designed to transform the river into a giant water machine. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this mythical watercourse has functioned as a laboratory to test and build a new civilization around the culture of water. Jointly authored by people and nature, the Ganges River is today a monstrous water machine in which the entire basin became a workshop of human-made experience, defined by a hydrological system best described as a supersurface: a surface engineered from the scale of the soil to the scale of the nation. Everything from diffuse urban projects and green revolutions to colossal public works programs and architectural transformations constitute the genesis of the Ganges Water Machine. Whether to thwart massive peasant uprisings or to redirect monsoonal rains to productive ends, never before has a river that inspired the realization of unbelievable architectural and infrastructural projects received as little scrutiny as the Ganges river basin. Reaching through the very heart of some of India s most densely populated cities, small towns, industrial zones, sacred sites, and mountainous forests, Ganges Water Machine by Anthony Acciavatti, composed of eight years of field and archival research, explores and theorizes the people and infrastructures that shaped this territory. Ganges Water Machine is an atlas of the enterprise to make the Ganges River basin into a highly engineered landscape: it reveals the narratives and explanations that allowed engineers and planners to realize fantasies previously only imaginable on paper or in myth.

This book is a lush and beautiful memoir of a very special house and a superb recreation of a bygone era.

"A lyrical homage to India's holiest, moodiest, foulest river...Trojanow is the perfect mix of insider and outsider... It is a treasure of a book, a must-have for anyone spending time on the Ganges and wanting to get to know her better."- Financial Times "Funny, shocking, and always interesting."- The Spectator Along the Ganges was voted one of the greatest travel books of all time by Conde Nast Traveler by a jury including Gore Vidal and Paul Theroux.The River Ganges has a thousand names, and Hindu priests thought it a sin to call her a river at all. She is a goddess, the source of the world. Her waters are holy, healing, and still sold to Hindus the world over. Ilija Tojanow, an international best-selling author, traveled along the Ganges from the source, where it breaks free from the ice in the Himalayas, to the great cities. Along the way he visited the great Hindu festivals and talked to those who warn of ecological disaster caused bygigantic dams. This colorful travelogue describes a country caught between ancient traditions and astonishing modernity, and the holy river that crosses it for hundreds of miles. Ilija Trojanow is the author Mumbai to Mecca (Haus Publishing) and the best-selling novel The Collector of Worlds, for which he was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

An illustrated ebook documenting the hugely varied and always entertaining career of one of Britain’s best-loved travel writers.