The Apple

Sin, cider and apple crumble. the 10,000-year story of the world's most tempting fruit.

The Apple: A Delicious History takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, from the apple's prehistoric beginnings in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan to the explosion of commercial apple-growing in twenty-first-century China.

Zigzagging across the centuries and straddling the globe, Sally Coulthard explores how the apple travelled along the Silk Road from Central Asia to Europe, appearing as an erotically charged symbol in Greek myth and poetry and even featuring in the shopping list of a senior Roman officer stationed on Hadrian's Wall.

She samples the cider that flowed from the emperor. Charlemagne's orchards in the early Middle Ages, and relishes the crispness of the yellow sweeting, the first new apple variety to be cultivated in seventeenth-century America. And she discovers why, despite the existence of more than 7500 varieties of apple - from the ubiquitous Granny Smith to the purple-skinned Black Diamond of Tibet - only a handful of cultivars are available in modern supermarkets.