Josiah the Great

The fantastical tale of an early nineteenth-century American adventurer who forges his own kingdom in the wilds of Afghanistan.In the year 1838, a young adventurer, surrounded by his native troops and mounted on an elephant, raised the American flag on the summit of the Hindu Kush and declared himself Prince of Ghor, the heir to Alexander the Great.Josiah Harlan, the first American to set foot in Afghanistan, would become the model for Kipling¿s The Man Who Would be King, but the true story of his life is stranger than fiction. A soldier, spy, doctor, naturalist and writer, Harlan set off into the wilds of Central Asia after a failed love affair in 1820. An extraordinary mixture of parts ¿ eccentric, inquisitive and brave to the point of lunacy ¿ he was also an acute observer who understood the Afghan people as no foreigner had done before.Using a trove of newly discovered documents, including Harlan¿s long-lost journals, Ben Macintyre has followed Harlan¿s footsteps to uncover an astonishing, untold chapter in the history of the Great Game.`A wonderfully compelling story, immediate and engrossing¿ Sunday Telegraph