Nambia is the youngest of the African nations, having gained its independence only in 1990 after a century of controversial colonial rule, and is one of the most scenically splendid. The country sprawls over the western region of the southern subcontinent, a vast, sparsely populated, and mostly desolate territory larger than the state of Texas, four times the size of the United Kingdom.

It is a land of many faces. Extending almost 2 000 kilometres along the bleak and forbidding Atlantic seaboard is the Namib, the world’s oldest and perhaps most fascinating desert, a strange, silent, empty, hauntingly beautiful wasteland of shifting dunes, of hard, flat plains, and rarely flowing rivers with sandy beds, bone dry for years on end but incongruously, refreshingly mantled in greenery. To the east is the high central plateau and the charming city of Windhoek, whose architecture, like that of many of the smaller Namibian towns echoes its German past. To the north is a more fertile and populous region, notable for the great alluvial plain created by the Okavango and other water courses that flow down from Angola to feed the huge, shallow depression, known as the Etosha Pan, centerpiece of one of the continent’s most splendid game parks.

It is this rich diversity of people, places and wildlife that internationally celebrated photographer Gerald Cubitt captures on film, taking the reader on an enchanting tour of town and village, diamond field and game reserve, ocean and coast, canyons and mountain ranges, and endless desert .