After graduating from the University of Edinburgh in the summer of 1996, Alexandra Tolstoy began working for an investment banking firm in New York and London, only to quit within a year. Like many twentysomethings, she longed to travel, to find adventure. Soon those longings found their outlet, when she learned that an acquaintance dreamed of riding across Central Asia along the ancient Silk Road on horses and camels. Before long, a plan took shape: to journey nearly five thousand miles through the desert, steppes, mountains, and forests of the great trade route between East and West.
In The Last Secrets of the Silk Road, Alexandra Tolstoy recounts the incredible sojourn she made with three companions in 1999 through some of the most ruggedly beautiful and least-explored countries and areas of the world: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgzstan, the Taklamakan Desert, and finally, China. In lands associated with Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Alexander the Great, Peter Fleming, and "The Great Game," Alexandra and Sophia ("Mouse") Cunningham, Victoria ("Wic") Westmacott, and Lucy Kelaart encountered extremes of climate and landscape, braved dangers, and found camaraderie and friendship, on an eight-month-long journey of a lifetime.

Countess ALEXANDRA TOLSTOY is the daughter of historian Nikolai Tolstoy and a distant cousin of the author of War and Peace. She lives in Moscow, where she is establishing a travel company which will organize riding, trekking, and mountaineering tours in Central Asia. This is her first book.