Top 20 Best Science Books of 2020 – Amazon
Best History Books of the Year 2020 – The Times
Editors’ Choice – The New York Times
‘the definitive account of the golden age of Egyptology’
Waterstone’s Best Books of 2020: History
‘fluent and entertaining… a story full of drama, with the Nile, the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings as a backdrop… A World Beneath the Sands is also a subtle and stimulating study of the paradoxes of 19th-century colonialism’
Tom Holland, The Guardian
‘excellent… riveting… Wilkinson is a consummate historian… He has mastered the facts with painstaking research and allowed them to speak for themselves. Rarely do the facts speak this clearly’
The New York Times
‘It would be hard to overstate the excellence of Wilkinson’s storytelling’
The Spectator
‘fascinating… “A World Beneath the Sands” is more than a saga of foreigners in the desert – it also follows Egypt on its rocky path to the 20th century’
The Economist
‘dramatic, detailed and eccentric-packed… as Toby Wilkinson shows, the discovery of lost monuments, grave goods and mummified corpses also stimulated the emergence of their true inheritors, the modern Egyptian nation’
Wall Street Journal
‘A gripping tale… excellent’
Financial Times
‘vividly detailed’
The New Yorker
‘highly colourful… the scholarship, the imperialism and the looting – all [are] skilfully and entertainingly plotted’
The Sunday Times
‘a superbly readable, magnificently entertaining, profoundly thoughtful and scholarly history’
The Tablet, Books of the Year
‘elegantly written’
BBC History Magazine
‘Wilkinson marshals a wealth of detail into a cohesive and entertaining narrative… an essential portrait’
Publishers Weekly