“Accomplished, well researched and pacey … for anyone who wants to look beyond the headlines and explore the context of some of the biggest challenges facing the world today, it is fascinating” – City AM
“One of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine” – Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard, on Prisoners of Geography

Walls are going up. Nationalism and identity politics are on the rise once more. Thousands of miles of fences and barriers have been erected since the turn of the century, and they are redefining our political landscape.

There are many reasons why walls go up, because we are divided in many ways: wealth, race, religion, politics. In Europe the divisions of the past decade threaten not only European unity, but in some countries liberal democracy itself. In China, the Party’s need to contain the divisions wrought by capitalism will define the nation’s future. In the USA the rationale for the Mexican border wall runs deeper than the need to control illegal immigration; it taps into the fear that the USA will no longer be a white majority country during the course of this century.

Understanding what has divided us, past and present, is essential to understanding much of what’s going on in the world today. In eight chapters covering China; the USA; Israel; the Middle East; India and Bangladesh; Africa; Europe and the UK, bestselling author Tim Marshall presents an unflinching and essential overview of the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come.