Between the interiors of the USA and Mexico lies a borderland: Amexica.

A terrain astride the world's busiest frontier, teeming with migrants, factory workers, narcos, tourists, heroines and heroes, ranchers and rogues.

A border both porous and harsh, criss-crossed by a million people every day.

A warzone, where a grotesque pastiche of the globalised economy plays out in a tragedy of unfathomable violence as drug cartels and state forces face off.

Amexica is a journey through the cartels' reach into the borderland's daily life: through migrant camps, drug-smuggling 'plazas', rehab centres, sweatshop factories and the mass-murder of women. Updated with new material ten years on it paints an essential portrait of a country under siege - and testament to people who carry on regardless.

'Previously, to understand the ruthlessness, ambition and impact of today's global criminals, you needed to read Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah and Misha Glenny's McMafia. Now, you also need to read Vulliamy's Amexica' The Sunday Times

Ed Vulliamy is a journalist and writes for the Guardian and Observer. He has been shortlisted for an Amnesty International Media Award for his reporting on Mexico. For his work in Bosnia, Italy, the US and Iraq he has won a James Cameron Award and an Amnesty International Media Award and has been named International Reporter of the Year (twice) and runner-up at the Foreign Press Association Awards. In 1996 he became the first journalist to ever testify at an international crimes court, at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. A believer in the duty of journalists to testify in matters of humanitarian law, he has since lectured extensively on the subject.

'The most vivid book so far published in English on the bloody calamity that has been visited on Mexico's northern border lands...this is a fascinating introduction to the bloody last act of the "war on drugs"'Observer

In the last three years more than 23,000 people have been murdered in Amexica - the area of land that forms the border between the US and Mexico. This is both the busiest and most deadly frontier in the world, studded with guard-posts, infra-red searchlights and heavily armed patrols.Across it unfolds a war that is scarcely reported - a war that's being fought, with thousands dying and millions of lives blighted, so that Europe and America can get high.

In Amexica, acclaimed journalist Ed Vulliamy explores his own love-hate relationship with the place and its people, while investigating the causes and consequences of the war and its impact on the everyday life which somehow carries on around it.

'Vivid social reportage...an extraordinarily powerful work' Spectator

'This absorbing odyssey along the Mexican-American border gives pause for thought to anyone who ignores the side-effects of cocaine...Vulliamy's reporting is faultlessly brave...the scenery and characters he meets are brought alive with vividness and intensity' Daily Telegraph

'Like all good travel writing, Amexica is vivid, colorful and exotic, filled with striking vignettes and larger-than-life characters' New York Times