Homelands : A Personal History of Europe

'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of FreeHomelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reporting and memoir by our greatest writer about Europe. Drawing on half a century of travel and thinking, Homelands tells the story of Europe since its emergence from wartime hell in 1945: how it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered. Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying Europe.

Highly personal and deeply felt, this book is also full of vivid experiences, encounters and anecdotes: from his father's memories of D-Day to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo, and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe and the US. Homelands is both a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine.

At its heart, this book is an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.