City of djinns

As Dalrymple's first book, "In Xanadu", traversed thousands of miles, now he traverses thousands of years.

In the course of 12 months in Delhi, he peels back the successive encrusting layers of history, using both material and human remains of each of the eight cities of Delhi, interlacing innumerable stories with the present and ending with the Delhi creation myth contained in the great Indian epic "The Mahabharata".