The world is awash with books so why did I write another – this one? The answer is that exploration and storytelling are in my blood. I was obsessed by the urge to travel to some of the most remote, beautiful and dangerous places on earth – along the Silk Road in Central Asia. And I wanted to know how special it felt to ride a Mongolian pony, the type used to conquer half the known world during the Middle Ages.

What is unique about this book? It captures a time of great historical importance, around the year 1989 – the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was once a vast empire covering one sixth of the world’s land mass. The impact of this on Central Asia was tremendous – widespread upheaval and chaos.

This book portrays the fear, uncertainty, confusion and suffering which accompanied the region’s painful transition from Soviet domination to “freedom” in the new, post-Communist age. It is a story that must be told, because it is too easy, as time passes and memories fade, to think that the transition just happened, effortlessly. It did not; it was a huge struggle, which continues today. I travelled to Central Asia when the Former Soviet Union was falling to pieces; the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989; Western visitors were allowed behind the crumbling Iron Curtain for the first time in decades; the individual ex-Soviet states were bankrupt and struggling to survive. Into this power vacuum sprang all sorts of ruthless political and religious groups. Their tools were violence and hatred. The resulting turmoil is still evident now – the bombings, massacres and wars.

As a child the mysteries and inaccessibility of the Silk Road and the Gobi Desert, the legend of Marco Polo and the Mongol Empire fired my imagination and haunted my dreams. It is widely known that Genghis Khan and his Mongol Hordes built the largest empire that the world has ever known. It stretched from the Yellow River in Central China across to Byzantium, the Mediterranean and down into the Indian subcontinent. But how many people know why the Mongols did what they did – both the destruction on a massive scale and Pax Mongolica – centuries of peace, prosperity, religious tolerance, law and order across their entire Empire? How many know the spiritual beliefs of the Mongols? And what part did holy men play in advising the Khans (Mongol leaders) on when and how to act?

Until the official dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Gorbachev era in December 1991, virtually all of the Silk Road was out of bounds to Westerners. With the Berlin Wall down, I was allowed into countries to discover their pasts, and glimpse their futures. My guides were KGB officers, their wages unpaid for months by the ruined states. They were eager to earn a living from escorting visitors through the perilous, unstable landscape.

And so my journeys of discovery began. The pictures which follow are happy memories of my travels in Central Asia, and are the setting for the story of Seven Days in Mozandah.

Is Mozandah an actual country? No. It is a combination of many of the facets of reality, which occur in the region – in the past and in the present.

Is Mozandah real? Sadly, yes. Look at today’s news – and next year’s. There is no shortage of religious strife, conflict and political manipulation along the Silk Road.  Iran, Iraq and Lebanon are some of the afflicted countries which lie on it.

When writing this book I wore the hat of Storyteller – so that readers would enjoy it for what it is – a work of fiction about adventure and danger, love and conflict and the search for truth.

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