Simon Sebag Montefiore

We are most excited to welcome Simon Sebag Montefiore, master storyteller and internationally bestselling author, to Ely for his latest book, The World. The World is the story of humanity from prehistory to the present day, told through the one thing all humans have in common: family. 

We begin with the footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago. From here, Montefiore takes us on an exhilarating epic journey through the families that have shaped our world: the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads.

A rich cast of complex characters form the beating heart of the story, from well-known leaders, such as Alexander the Great, Attila, and Obama, to creatives like Socrates, Michelangelo and Shakespeare, to lesser-known figures, such as Hongwu, who began life as a beggar and founded the Ming dynasty. Here are not just conquerors and queens but prophets, charlatans, actors, gangsters, artists, scientists, doctors, tycoons, lovers, wives, husbands and children.

This is world history on the most grand and intimate scale - spanning centuries, continents and cultures, and linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, medicine and technology to the people at the centre of the human drama.

As spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the story of humankind in all its joy, sorrow, romance, ingenuity and cruelty in a ground-breaking, single narrative that will forever shift the boundaries of what history can achieve.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the internationally bestselling author of prize-winning books that have been published in forty-eight languages, including CATHERINE THE GREAT & POTEMKIN; STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR; and THE ROMANOVS: 1613-1918. He is the author of the Moscow Trilogy of novels: SASHENKA, RED SKY AT NOON and ONE NIGHT IN WINTER, which won the Political Fiction Book of the Year Award, and is also the author of WRITTEN IN HISTORY: LETTERS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, and VOICES OF HISTORY: SPEECHES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD.