Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes - coming April 2025
big book news, plus an exclusive taster
Tomorrow, that horizon, that hill. Push on. Keep on pushing.
And with those words the last book in my “colour trilogy” begins…
Following on from Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes through Darkness and Light (2018) and Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia (2020) the final in the trio is: Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes.
It will be simultaneously published in both the UK and US in early April and it is ready to pre-order now (you can do so here, and I would be extremely grateful!)
In the book, which starts in Armenia and ends in Georgia, you’ll find tough treks, easy hill walks and city rambles through all weathers including deep snow and an energy sapping heatwave. Along the way, landscapes and local histories come alive via encounters with priests, fruit pickers, tea harvesters, legendary singers, artists, chess masters and heroic alpinists.
The route
It felt natural to slow down for the final instalment and to take the reader the lands between the Black Sea, the topic of my first book, and the Caspian Sea where the second book, Red Sands, began. The Caucasus therefore. Familiar territory but fresh ground.
But which direction for the compass? Where to start? With walking, firstly it is necessary to pick a rough route. In that regard, it is simple.
When I first began thinking of this book, back in 2019, I’d planned to complete the journey in the North Caucasus, in Russia, but the war put that firmly out of range. Putin’s Russia had become not only a thoroughly immoral destination to visit, but a dangerous one, too.
Therefore Green Mountains focuses on the South Caucasus, a landscape of clefted valleys and ancient cities. By beginning beneath the Lesser Caucasus range in Armenia I chose a direction that would gradually move northwards...
But this, too, is an area riven by complex antagonisms and geopolitics.
My route meant leaving out neighbouring Azerbaijan, also a place of emerald-green mountains, fascinating food (a book ought to be written on the wildly varied pilafs alone), convivial villages and compelling stories. But I decided that given the ongoing conflict with Armenia, and the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh which happened while I was writing, including both countries in the same book, for now at least, would be misguided. I spent a long time considering this and of course some will disagree (that is what happens sometimes when you write a book…)
Green Mountains marks the culmination of roughly 10,000 miles travelled, and about a decade of thinking, planning, exploring, walking, photographing, tasting, searching, investigating, saving, spending, wandering, researching and writing.
Collectively, the project has been a wild, and utterly fascinating, trip and it is no exaggeration to say that working on these books has been the highlight of my writing life, and a great privilege.
The cover
The verdant cover, with its path leading you into the hills and into the book, was designed by the incomparable Dave Brown who has worked with me for many years, and on both Black Sea and Red Sands.
You can see the similarities - it was important to us all that they sit well as a set, as a trilogy:
The design of Green Mountains is based on a photograph I took, as you can see below. It is the landscape of the Truso Valley, in northern Georgia, where I was walking a couple of summer’s ago with my good friend Meagan Neal.
Meagan heads up the development of the epic Transcaucasian Trail (TCT) - a series of long distance walking trails through Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, and she is quite simply one of the best people I know. Modest, brilliant, brave and generous, and a truly fantastic hill woman.
At the end of the extract below you’ll find instructions on how to make a Kazbek Cooler, a simple recipe for a refreshing post-walk cocktail. My first thought was to dedicate it to my friend Meagan but I knew she’d actually prefer to share it with her TCT crew so the citrusy cooler was created in honour of the whole team.
The recipes - footsteps to flavours
The crop of recipes I have included in Green Mountains, or as I like to call them, “edible postcards”, are a way for me, a home cook, to send something of the flavours of Armenia and Georgia onwards to you the reader.
Though not strictly authentic, they were all crafted out of curiosity and affection, and with a huge admiration for the cooks who fed me so well throughout my journeys.
At the end of every single walk, without exception, there would always be the opportunity for good food, and often excellent wine, carefully prepared.
In Green Mountains expect herby soups, sweet and sour salads, rice-filled pumpkins, a lot of delicious grain-based dishes and stuffed flat breads. And fruity puddings! Flavours of tarragon, apricot, lemon, red pepper, walnut, blue fenugreek, coriander and sour plum - all appear regularly.
~
There will be various events pegged around the book when it comes out but there is an early one I’d like to flag up as it will sell out quickly…
My friends at Honey & Co will be serving a three-course meal, cooked from Green Mountains, on Monday 31 March, at their Lamb’s Conduit Street restaurant in London. You can book your place here. The menu includes herb-filled flatbreads, summer tolma with barberries, courgettes with Georgian spices and walnuts, lamb with plums, green beans & cinnamon or vegetarian adjapsandali (Georgian-style ratatouille). All finished with a tarragon panna cotta.
~
Lastly, before I get to the extract below, I want to say thank you.
I know many subscribing to this newsletter have copies of Black Sea and/or Red Sands (or my other books, Cold Kitchen and Samarkand) and I am so very grateful to find a place on your bookshelves. Without readers, there are no books!