Along the Amber Route

'Timely and powerful.' Financial Times Portable and expensive, amber has always been a desirable commodity. C.J. Schüler follows the historic Amber Route from St Petersburg to Venice through three millennia of history. Throughout his journey, current politics and his own family's experience of persecution and flight are never far from his mind.As he traces the greatest fault lines of European geopolitics and explores lands contested by Romans and Vandals, Teutons and Slavs, empires and the former Iron Curtain, Schüler must also confront his family history, Nazism and the Holocaust.

C.J. Schüler is the author of three illustrated histories of cartography: Mapping the World, Mapping the City and Mapping the Sea and Stars and co-author of the best-selling Traveller's Atlas. His most recent book, Writers, Lovers, Soldiers, Spies: A History of the Authors' Club of London, 1891-2016 was published in November 2016. He has also written on literature, travel and the arts for The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Tablet, The Financial Times and the New Statesman. He was chairman of the Authors' Club from 2008 to 2015.