Perhaps it's the combination of extreme beauty and violence which add to the allure of some landscapes. This is true in the case of Kashmir and the Indus region, the settings for Justine Hardy and Alice Albinia's books respectively.

Albinia tells us that her book about the Indus began as a historical account of the region, and became a combined travel and history book as she took herself on a strange journey along the river. She reads an excerpt which relies heavily on the academic research she did here in Edinburgh. It contains an account of her journey along the river with a fisherman called Bapu, and diverts into the history of regional marketplace politics and the disastrous influence of the Raj; the British colonised the area after a spy secretly mapped the Indus river by night.

Hardy reads to us from her very personal and vivid book about Kashmir, which focuses on the last 20 years of war in the region and the author's work with a community-oriented psychiatric project. Hardy tells us that she went to the Kashmir valley as a child, staying on river boats and waking up to lotus flowers in the water. She reads us her account of returning to the area 20 years later as a journalist, and seeing the formerly beautiful area as a battlefield. Hardy's account is vivid, thrilling and upsetting, and reveals a sincere personal commitment to the region. She shows a strong understanding of the needs of the community, entirely without Eurocentric assumptions.

Hardy's book illustrates family life-focusing on one particular family-as the accessible side of war. She speaks about the striking shift from modernity to orthodoxy in the last 20 years. Hardy suggests that “belief stands between you and death” in wartime.

Both readings are challenging and well-formed. Although Albinia's project shows an unusual combination of physical bravery and academia, it's Hardy's which I find most compelling in it's dedication and depth of investigation.