Rebel Land
Christopher de Bellaigue
Bloomsbury
What Is the Meaning of Love and Death in a Remote,
Forgotten, Impossibly Conflicted Part of the World?
In Rebel Land, the acclaimed author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue journeys to Turkey’s inhospitable eastern provinces to find out. In the achingly beautiful district of Varto, a place left behind in Turkey’s march to modernity, medieval in its attachment to race and religious sect, he examines the violent history of conflict between Turks, Kurds and Armenians, and the maelstrom of emotion and memories that define its inhabitants even today.
The result is a compellingly personal account of one man’s exploration of the past, as the author, mistrusted by all he meets, and particularly by the secret agents of the State, applies his investigative flair and fluent Turkish to jealously guarded taboos and holds humanity’s excesses up to the light of a very modern sensibility.
Christopher de Beilaigue was born in London in 1971 and has spent the past decade and a half in the Middle East and south Asia. He has worked as a correspondent for a number of publications including the Economist, the New York Review of Books, Harpers, Prospect magazine and the Financial Times. He is the author of two books, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and The Struggle For Iran, which led Prospect magazine to describe him as ‘one of the best of the new generation of Middle East experts’.
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