The rise and rise of the Bin Laden family is one of the world's great stories of the 20th century: the repercussions of that rise have, of course, already deeply marked the 21st century. And yet, it is a story that has never been properly told. Their affairs shrouded in secrecy, living in one of the most powerful, closed and unaccountable countries on earth, the Bin Ladens have - until now - successfully fended off all attempts to understand the world from which Osama sprang. In only two generations, the men and women of the Bin Laden family moved from a desert canyon in Yemen to luxury jets, yachts and private compounds around the world. The religious and cultural pressures could not have been greater. This resulted in everything from enthusiasm for the West, exemplified by Osama's brother Salem, a free-living pilot and adventurer, to an overwhelming determination to destroy it. The Bin Ladens - meticulously researched, brilliantly written - is one of the major works to be provoked by the current crisis. Colourful, shocking, entertaining and disturbing, it dramatizes all the strange contradictions of globalization in the story of a single family who have used money, mobility and technology to frighteningly varied ends.