Dazzling . . . Not just a historical study but also a love letter.

Guardian

[Dalrymple is] one of India's finest popular chroniclers . . . his great achievement is in assembling the disparate fragments of early India's engagements across the continent into a delightfully readable whole.

New York Times

An outstanding new account . . . The most compelling retelling we have had for generations.

Financial Times

Audacious . . . Mr. Dalrymple sets out to correct what he believes is a narrative wrong-the playing down of India and Indians in Western accounts of history . . . [he] must get credit for flying the flag of the land that has been lucky enough to become his obsession.

Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal

William Dalrymple's The Golden Road puts ancient and early medieval India at the heart of an empire of ideas, trade, science, religion and culture. In this masterful work, Dalrymple . . . aims to correct "India's often forgotten position" as a cultural and economic superpower that, in his telling, transformed Asia and much of the world.

Nishant Dahiya, NPR

In his masterful new work, . . . historian William Dalrymple argues that India has both the potential and the historical track record to catch up with its former peer to the northeast ... The Golden Road fills an important gap in our understanding of the intra-Asian relations that predated the arrival of European colonisers.

Bloomberg