"Fascinating, informative, sometimes exhilarating, often painful, and quite impossible to summarise... This is a splendidly panoramic picture of our common European home, a book to read through and then to dip into frequently... I thoroughly recommend his book" (Allan Massie Literary Review)

"A broader travelling history of the whole of Europe's 20th century" (Economist)

"His genius as a historian is his instinct for human stories... At moments in this monumental work... Mak is the history teacher everyone should have had" (Financial Times)

"Part masterpiece... breathtaking invention" (Jan Morris The Times)

"An ingenious geographical-chronological structure... It's impossible not to get drawn into this book -" (Sunday Telegraph)

The Vintage Classics Europeans series - with covers provided by textile design firm Wallace Sewell, these are must-have editions of European masterpieces, celebrating the warp and weft of a shared literary treasury.


In 1999, journalist and historian Geert Mak criss-crossed the continent in the simple yet monumental quest to trace European twentieth-century history as the world slipped into the twenty-first. In Europe is a dazzling account of that journey, and combines the larger story of Europe with intimate, vivid detail. It is also now a poignant reminder that the European project was then and is now a unprecedented experiment; that we still have ?a great deal to tell each other and a great deal to explain.?

TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY SAM GARRETT


?A wonderfully rich journey through time and space? Independent on Sunday