In the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Ferdinand, the heir of Austria, arrived with his wife at the Sarajevo train station, Europe was still living in peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The ensuing conflict left over fifteen million dead, destroyed three empires, and radically changed world history.
How did the Balkans - a region remote from the centers of power and wealth in Europe - become the epicenter of such a massive tragedy? Christopher Clark avoids the temptation to attribute the outbreak to a single cause or a single country. He traces the paths that led to the war, passing through all the critical decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and closely following the stormy developments. Thus, he reveals a fragmented world of instability and discord, a Europe burdened even with a fateful and unsuccessful group of political leaders. These governors, who boasted of their modernism and rationality, plunged from crisis to crisis until they convinced themselves that war was the only answer.

A brilliantly written and thoroughly documented book, "The Sleepwalkers" is the impressive assessment of the ignition and explosion of one of the greatest events in modern history.