Kassia St Clair's Race to the Future

From the author of the hugely successful The Secret Lives of Colour and The Golden Thread comes an incredible true story of the quest against the odds that shaped the world we live in today.

10 June 1907, Peking. Five cars set off in a desperate race across two continents on the verge of revolution.

An Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a conman and various journalists battle over steep mountain ranges and across the arid vastness of the Gobi Desert.

The contestants need teams of helpers to drag their primitive cars up narrow gorges, lift them over rough terrain and float them across rivers. Petrol is almost impossible to find, there are barely any roads, armed bandits and wolves lurk in the forests. Updates on their progress, sent by telegram, are eagerly devoured by millions in one of the first ever global news stories. Their destination: Paris.

More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris provided the impetus for profound change. The world of 1907 is poised between the old and the new: communist regimes will replace imperial ones in China and Russia; the telegraph is transforming modern communication and the car will soon displace the horse.

St Clair traces the fascinating stories of two interlocking races - setting the derring-do (and sometimes cheating) of one of the world's first car races against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological rush to the future, as the rivalry grows between countries and empires, building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything - the First World War.

Kassia St. Clair is a bestselling cultural historian. She has written for newspapers such as the Economist, and the Telegraph, and appeared on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live, Woman's Hour, BBC

Radio 5 Live and CNN. Both of her previous books have been BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.