A journey through the fractured remnants of Yugoslavia by veteran journalist Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman.

In 1977, he and his family drove across what was the unified country of Yugoslavia on their way to his latest posting. Twenty-two years later, he accompanies a NATO refugee rescue mission trying to save the victims of a Serbian “ethnic cleansing” sweep, and Winchester realizes with a sudden shock that he’s been to this place before; what was once a peaceful valley where his family stopped for a picnic is now a squalid and desperate refugee gathering that the British NATO forces are scrambling to help.

So now he wants to know: how the hell did this happen in just twenty years?

His journey, from Vienna to Istanbul, across the old Ottoman Empire, is his attempt to figure it out.