Edmund Richardson – författare

"In this staggeringly good biography, Edmund Richardson reveals in riveting and sumptuous detail the real Alexander, the man behind the legend. Richardson has drawn on new sources from recent archeological discoveries, adding a real freshness to this millennia old story." -Daily MailAn enthralling new biography of Alexander the Great, written as an intimate, present portrait of the way his world saw him and the price he paid to become history's greatest military mind.Alexander the Great: a wide-eyed boy from the hills of Macedon who ruled most of the known world by his mid-twenties. For centuries, historians, refugees, poets, and explorers have told his story, and yet Alexander himself has remained a mystery.But over the last few years, a series of remarkable discoveries has changed everything. From the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and the dust of Central Asian hillsides, the remains of Alexander's cities have emerged. The diaries of Babylonian astronomers who knew him have been deciphered. The tombs of his ancestors have been unearthed. Now, for the first time since antiquity, it is possible to tell a different story. The story of a young man whom almost no-one noticed, until the day he became king. A king who became a hero, a hero who became a living god, and a god who died broken-hearted in Babylon.Using cutting-edge research and a unique narrative approach, Alexander thrusts readers into Alexander the Great's world in ways which have never before been possible: to see the same stars wheeling overhead, feel the desert wind, and experience the full horror of battle. Alexander is a cinematic work of non-fiction, a revelatory retelling of one of the most famous and elusive stories in history.

The King''s Shadow: The Extraordinary Tale of Charles Masson''s Epic Search for the Lost City of Alexandria in the Wild EastIn the age of empires, kings, and spies, Charles Masson embarked on a wild journey that would change the world. The King''s Shadow by Edmund Richardson is an impeccably researched tale of adventure, espionage, and discovery in nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan.Masson, a deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist, and spy, became one of the most respected scholars in Asia and the greatest of nineteenth-century travelers. He would take tea with kings, travel with holy men, master a hundred disguises, and even be offered his own kingdom. In 1833, he discovered the lost city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains, a meeting point of East and West that had vanished for centuries.Set during the Great Game, when imperial powers confronted each other in these staggeringly beautiful lands, Masson''s story is one of extreme violence, both personal and military, and boundless hope. He would discover tens of thousands of pieces of Afghan history, including the 2,000-year-old Bimaran golden casket, which bears the earliest known face of the Buddha.Richardson''s storytelling immerses readers in a world of dreamers, opportunists, and ne''er-do-wells at the edge of empire, amid the deserts and the mountains. The King''s Shadow is the extraordinary untold story of an obsession passed down the centuries, a journey through the wild east that evokes both the exploits of Indiana Jones and the epic adventures of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.