Red Sands

Red Sands is the second book of Caroline Eden's 'colour trilogy', the follow-up to her multi-award winning book, Black Sea. In her journey across Central Asia, Caroline uses food as her agent to give readers a very personal insight into this under-reported region, a land that bridges Europe and East Asia; links Russia and China; neighbours Iran and Afghanistan.

While exploring mosques set in desert caves, wedding halls that glitter and suffocate, disorientating walnut forests, hotels for the heroes of the Soviet space programme and the cloying dining rooms of withered and cracked sanatoriums we meet the stars of this book. These are the cooks, poets, entrepeneurs, historians, garderners and fishermen of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Humanity and hope - and the importance of a good shared meal on the road - may be the messages that emerge from Caroline's journey but it is the region's unsparing natural geography that pushes the pace. And at the heart of Central Asia, lying sunburnt and untamed, is the 'red sands' desert known as the Kyzylkum.