A towering history of the first Afghan War by bestselling historian William Dalrymple

In his rollicking look at the First Afghan War, Britain's military inclusion into the region in 1842, Dalrymple has certainly gone a mile or two further than most historians with his research ... Yet for all its current geopolitical echoes, Return of a King's strengths are - like Dalrymple's two other history titles, the bestsellers White Mughals and The Last Mughal - in the characters and its combination of sprightly readability and serious research ... Likely to become the definitive book on this highly topical subject Bookseller Takes the charm and natural verve of City of Djinns, marries it to the intellectual and spiritual engagement of From the Holy Mountain, and brings it off with all the narrative skill developed in his history books, combined with his ever more profound understanding of India Maya Jasanoff, author of Edge of Empire on Nine Lives At its best travel writing beats fiction, firing the imagination with tales of foreign peoples drawn close by our common humanity. This is travel writing at its very best Observer No brief review can do justice to its manifold excellence ... This is quite simply a stunning achievement Frank McLynn, Independent on Sunday on White Mughals William Dalrymple is that rarity: a scholar of history who can really write Salman Rushdie

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, The Age of Kali, White Mughals, The Last Mughal and, most recently, Nine Lives. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d'Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone Crossword Award and has three times been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In 2012 he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.