Borderlines

Europe's internal borders have rarely been 'natural'; they have more often been created by accident or force. Successive powers have redrawn the map of our continent, with varying degrees of success: the fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander I, Castlereagh, Napoleon III and Bismarck are all there, but the present shape of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945.

In Borderlines, writer and political historian Lewis Baston journeys along and across key borders from west to east Europe, to explore their history. He explores how places and people heal from the scars, physical and psychological, left by a Europe of ethnic cleansing and barbed wire fences. And he searches for a better European future amid the ravages of Brexit, COVID and war - finding it in unexpected places, scattered from the back lanes of rural Ireland to the Viennese-style coffee houses of the elegant Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi.

A work of contemporary history that will appeal to readers of Tim Marshall but also Cal Flyn, Borderlines is a wry but ultimately optimistic look at Europe from its edges, the places where the questions and contradictions are sharpest - the cracks where the light gets in.