Mapping the Past

Following his mother's death, Charles Drazin discovered a battered suitcase in his loft bearing the initials of his grandfather, a man he never knew. Inside was a treasure trove of photographs - of five men, in various far-flung locations. Following the most delicate of threads, he returned to the tiny village in Ireland where his mother was born, and began a search for the lives behind the images.

Mapping Empire is the result. It is the story of five brothers from rural Ireland, who travelled around the world as officers in the Royal Engineer Corps –surveying, exploring, mapmaking, fighting – in the twilight years of the British Empire. Moving from Eire today back to Britain at the height of her Imperial power, and covering the domestic conflicts of the late nineteenth century and the devastation of the First World War, via some of the most remote, hostile and uncharted parts of the planet, this is an imaginative, intimate and powerful work of history, by a writer of rare power.