Crossing Continents is a book that excites wonder. Taking readers by the hand with her engaging prose, Heather Sharkey introduces us one-by-one to a set of keyholes through which she captures a view of the fascinating connected histories of Egypt, the Sudan, and the world in an age of empire, mobility, and globalization... Building from over a decade’s worth of purposeful, capacious detective work across a constellation of Middle Eastern, European and global archives, Sharkey conjures up the voices of individuals whose lives, families, and fortunes were carried on the tides of some of the most important events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the Franco-Prussian War to the Boxer Uprising to the Suez Crisis. Moreover, she brings to these ‘small worlds’ not only the precise, analytical tools of the historian, but also insights drawn from anthropology, sociology, museum studies, and the study of material culture. A testament to a scholar’s joy for the historian’s craft, Crossing Continents is global history at its best: empathetic, multilingual, and ambitious in its storytelling. This is a book that will move and inspire readers who are looking for a usable past, one in which everyone counts and every place matters.