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Homelands

Homelands

A Personal History of Europe - Updated with a New Chapter

Summary

**Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize 2024**
**A Financial Times Best Book of 2023**

'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of Free

Drawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered.

Timothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and this deeply felt book is full of vivid experiences: from his father's memories of D-Day and his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi to interviewing Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents.

Homelands is at once a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress, a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong and an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

'The right book for Europe, at the right time' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

'Tremendously enjoyable ... thoughtful, honest, open, self-deprecating' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

'Readers could hardly wish for a wiser guide ... defiantly hopeful' Financial Times

Reviews

  • A panoramic contemporary history of Europe, in which sharp political analysis is enlivened with personal memoir - drawn from decades of distinguished work as a journalist and academic
    FT Summer Book of 2023

About the author

Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash was 17 when Britain joined the European Community and 64 when Britain left it. In the intervening years he has lived and breathed European politics, witnessing some of the most dramatic scenes in its history, interviewing many of its key players and analysing how life has evolved for ordinary Europeans across the breadth of the continent.

He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and a columunist for the Guardian. He has won many prizes and plaudits for his journalism and books, including The File, his riveting autobiographical account of investigating the contents of his Stasi file after the fall of East Germany.
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