Slow Rise

Every day, around 4.5 billion people consume bread. For thousands of years, it has been one of the staple foods of humankind, as present in stories from the Bible as it is when we share a meal with friends. Many types of bread are representative of the societies that bake them - baguettes in France, challah in Israel, injera in Ethiopia - and the bread you eat (or don't eat) can say a lot about who you are, even today.

In Bread, critically-acclaimed author Rob Penn tells the fascinating story of our relationship with this food: from the domestication of wheat in the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of civilisation, to the groundbreaking advances in harvesting and the iconoclastic artisan bakers of today. Along the way, he meets the unsung heroes behind the loaves we eat - wheat growers, grain merchants, millers and bakers - all of whom, over the course of a year, will teach him how to plant, harvest, thresh and winnow his own wheat in order to bake his own bread.

Taking us from the Karaca Mountains in south-east Turkey to the subsistence farms of Rajasthan, and from the banks of the Nile to the fabled boulangeries on the Seine in Paris, Bread is a universal celebration of a millennia-old tradition and the people who make it happen. Its story is the story of humanity.