His follow up work, City of Djinns is a crossover piece, half history book, half personal tale of a 26 year old writer making sense of Delhi’s 3000 years of history, starting in the 1980s and pulling us back in time with him. Now a master historian twelve books deep, Dalrymple began his career as a travel writer, an Oxbridge graduate who received a college bursary to backpack from the UK to Mongolia in search of Xanadu. A beautiful time capsule of Delhi 30 years ago, the autobiographical dive into India’s capital city is based in 1989 and was finally published in 1993. I read William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi in those early days of the pandemic. In those uncertain weeks I decided to get fully immersed in books based in India, as I reasoned that if I couldn’t physically see the country outside of my four Jaipur walls, then I’d visit virtually. In March 2020 I found myself stuck in India, stranded in the world's strictest lockdown, unable to leave my building at all for 2 months.
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