Audio book descriptionRight up to the moment when India and Pakistan became independent, the last British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was undecided as to which country should incorporate Kashmir into its borders. It was decided by the Hindu Maharajah that his largely Muslim state should join India. His decision precipitated a virtual state of war between the two countries and a bitter territorial dispute that persists to this day.
Audio book descriptionAn Afghan resistance fighter of the 1980s, once on the CIA payroll, has come back to haunt the agency. Kareem has become an enemy who works with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He has arranged the murder of an American CIA agent in Pakistan, which may compromise an intricate, long-planned CIA operation to capture Osama bin Laden. CIA officer Paul Patterson, who had "run" Kareem as an agent during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, sets out to track him down. Patterson navigates a shadow land of intrigue in England, Africa, the Middle East, and the United States, where truth and lies seem to merge. Colin MacKinnon, praised by the New Yorker for capturing "the le Carre manner", breathes life into historical fact with this gripping, fast-paced novel about the search for bin Laden in the months leading up to 9/11.
Audio book descriptionMichael Palin reads his own account of an epic journey across the Himalaya. The greatest mountain range on earth, it includes the Khyber Pass and the Silk Road, the mighty peaks of Everest and K2, and the gorges of the Yangtze. He passed through a fascinatingly mixed bag of countries: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, and secretive mountain kingdoms like Nepal, as well as one of the most volatile regions in the world, Kashmir.
Audio book descriptionIn 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverish