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This is the story of a journey like no other, as Jacek Hugo-Bader makes his way across Siberia, from Moscow to Vladivostok, in the middle of winter. Travelling alone in a modified Russian jeep, he traverses a continent that is two-and-a-half times bigger than America, awash with bandits and not always fully equipped with roads. Along the way, Hugo-Bader discovers a great deal of tragedy, but also plenty of dark humour among the reindeer shepherds, nomadic tribes, the former hippies, the shamans, and the followers of some of the many arcane religions that flourish in this isolated, impossible region.
From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world's last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his 'fellow travellers', the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia
When Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow, she found an apartment block in Romanov Street, once a residence of the Soviet elite. One of those ghostly neighbours was Stalin's henchman Vyacheslav Molotov. In Molotov's former apartment, Rachel Polonsky discovered his library and an old magic lantern. Molotov - ruthless apparatchik, participant in the collectivizations and the Great Purge - was also an ardent bibliophile. Molotov's library and his magic lantern became the prisms through which Rachel Polonsky renewed her vision of Russia. She visited cities and landscapes associated with the books in the library - Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova and many less well-known figures. Some were sent to the Gulag by the man who collected their books. She writes exceptionally well about the longings and aspirations of Russian writers in the course of a journey that takes her to the Arctic and Siberia, the Crimean summer and Lake Baikal, from the forests around Moscow to the vast steppes. In each place she encountered the spirit of great artists and the terrible past of a country ravaged by war, famine, and totalitarianism.
Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Luke Harding's haunting, brilliant account of the insidious methods used against him by a resurgent Kremlin which led to him becoming the first western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War. FEATURING A NEW FOREWORD FROM THE AUTHOR 'A courageous and explosive exposé.' ORLANDO FIGES 'Luke Harding is one of the best reporters in the world.' ROBERT SAVIANO 'An essential read.' NEW STATESMAN In 2007, Luke Harding arrived in Moscow to take up a new job as a correspondent for the British newspaper the Guardian. Within months, mysterious agents from Russia's Federal Security Service - the successor to the KGB - had broken...
A devastatingly original look at the world's worst dictators, through the eyes of their personal chefs, by award-winning Polish author Witold Szablowski. What is it like to cook for the most dangerous men in the world? In this darkly funny and fascinating book, Witold Szablowski travels across four continents in search of the personal chefs of five dictators. From the savannahs of Kenya to the faded glamour of Havana, and the bombed-out streets of Baghdad, Szablowski finds the men and women who cooked fish soup for Saddam Hussein, roasted goat for Idi Amin and chopped papaya salad for Pol Pot. He reveals the strangeness of a job where a single culinary mistake could be fatal, but a well-seasoned dish could change your life. And in doing so, he lifts the veil on what life is like at the very heart of power.
Turkey - a country torn between East and West, Islam and Islamophobia; permeated with both conservatism and post-modernity. As he travels across this beautiful country, Szablowski heads for the most remote villages and towns to meet young women who have run away from honour killings, wives forced into prostitution by their husbands, a family of immigrants from Africa who dream of a better life, and Kurdish journalists and freedom fighters. A polyphonic portrait of contemporary Turkey, this book evokes the present-day dreams and hopes of ordinary people, weaving a story from their potent and mesmerising tales.
Far from Moscow and St Petersburg, there lies another Russia. Overlooked by the new urban elites and almost unknown to the West, in the great provincial hinterlands of the Volga River and Siberia, Russians struggle to reconcile their old traditions with a new and unfamiliar world. Returning again and again, for over a decade, to the deep heartland of this rapidly-evolving country, Susan Richards has encountered extraordinary people and forged lasting friendships. Through their unforgettable stories and her own experiences she reveals how in Russia the past and the present cannot be separated. Illuminating a forgotten people and sweeping away traditional assumptions, "Lost and Found in Russia" is a compelling and essential portrait - poignant, yet full of hope for a new future.
"An ingenious marriage of comedy and crime." --Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate and author of Man Booker International Prize winner Flights A charming, witty, and deliciously spooky mystery, inspired by the work of Agatha Christie, following a bored socialite who becomes Cracow's most cunning amateur sleuth. Cracow, 1893. Zofia Turbotyńska--professor's wife and socialite--is bored at home, with little to do but plan a charity auction sponsored by the wealthy residents of a local nursing home and the nuns who work there. But when one of those residents is found dead, Zofia finds a calling: solving crimes. Ridiculed by the police, who have declared the deaths of natural cause, she starts her own murder investigation, unbeknownst to anyone but her loyal cook Franciszka and one reluctant nun. With her husband blissfully unaware of her secret, Zofia remakes herself into Cracow's greatest--or at the very least, most surprising--amateur detective. Full of period character and charm, Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing proves that everyone is capable of finding their passion in life, however unlikely it may seem.