William Dalrymple, three ways into India's buried history

If there’s one writer who can make Delhi’s rubble feel alive, it’s William Dalrymple.

I picked up City of Djinns first, more or less by accident, and it is still the best place to start. Part memoir, part history, it follows him through a year of living in the city and stumbling into its buried layers, from Sufi shrines to the last surviving courtiers of the Raj.

The Last Mughal narrows the lens to a single year, 1857, and the brutal end of nearly three centuries of Mughal rule in Delhi. It is meticulously reported and hard to put down for a work of history.

Age of Kali is the odd one out: a collection of essays from years of travelling through an India in the middle of violent, chaotic change, from Bombay’s underworld to Bihar’s caste wars.

Read together, they are a slow walk through three different Indias: the city as it is now, as it ended, and the country as it was becoming.