The Tenth Parallel

Eliza Griswold's The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Faultline between Christianity and Islam charts the struggle over who speaks for God in the latitudes where rival beliefs come to blows.

The tenth parallel - the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator - is the front line where Christianity and Islam collide. Here, from Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, both religions are experiencing huge and sometimes violent reawakenings.

Award-winning journalist Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years travelling this area and meeting its people, asking where belief ends and secular conflict begins, and examining how encounters between faiths will shape the future.

'Her dispatches are compelling. She writes beautifully ... and explains, more than any newspaper headline, what has gone wrong'
Michael Binyon, The Times

'A fascinating journey ... full of arresting stories woven around a provocative issue, which Griswold investigates through individual lives rather than caricatures or abstractions'
Linda Robinson, The New York Times

'The author brings to her book a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of place ... she visits some of the riskiest places on the planet and tracks down terrorists, warlords, renegade priests and aspiring Christian martyrs'
Michael Mewshaw, Washington Post

'Her book is a richly textured fugue that dramatizes the dizzying interplay between notions - faith, morality, identity - and nations'
Julie Cline, Los Angeles Times

Eliza Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation, received both the first Robert I. Friedman Award for investigative reporting and a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Her journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper's Magazine, among others. A collection of her poems, Wideawake Field, was published by FSG in 2007.