Indonesia

Look at a map of Indonesia and you see a scatter. Look again.

Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores: not a scatter but a chain, bending in one long arc for three thousand miles, parallel to a trench in the sea floor where one piece of the earth is sliding beneath another. The islands are the volcanoes. The country is the shape of a plate boundary.

From that single fact comes the rest of it - the ash that makes some of the most fertile soil on earth, the rice that feeds more than half a nation on one island, the straits that carried the traders and the religions they brought, the spices two empires killed for, and the earthquakes and the waves that are the same mechanism doing the rest of its work.

A country still being made, by a machine that has not switched off.

One book for every nation on earth, written to be read, not carried.