Hinterlands, by Hannah Lucinda Smith, is an original and evocative work of narrative journalism that wanders the jagged edges of empire. A veteran British journalist based in Istanbul, Smith examines a string of disputed, embargoed or unrecognised territories on the fringes of Europe, from Transnistria (on the eastern border of Moldova), Abkhazia (in the South Caucasus), post-Assad Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh (southwestern Azerbaijan) to Crimea, Kosovo and Cyprus.

These liminal places are, she says, ‘the West’s weak spots, the places where the global war is fuelled [by] money--laundering and weapons stockpiles … the disputed territories dotted around the continent’s fringes where Russia, Turkey and the new West collide’.

Thirty million people live ‘torn between rival nation states and their conflicting understandings of the past and future’. Some parts of their territory are extravagantly odd. On a hillside in northern Bosnia, Smith comes across a Russian-themed model village being built from scratch by a Bosnian Serb retiree and Putin