This is the account of the 15,000-mile journey Colin Thubron made through Siberia, an astonishing country and one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth.
He journeyed by train, river and truck among the people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union, travelling among Buddhists and animists, radical Christian sects, reactionary Communists and the remnants of a so-called Jewish state; from the site of the last Czar’s murder and Rasputin’s village, to the ice-bound graves of ancient Sythians, to Baikal, deepest and oldest of the world’s lakes. It is the story of a people moving through the ruins of Communism into more private, diverse and often stranger worlds.
‘A profound meditation on how some of the great upheavals of this century touched ordinary lives’ Kazuo Ishiguro, Observer, Books of the Year
‘I have never made it as far as Siberia, but reading this book makes me feel as if I have actually been there. Thubron weaves his own observations beautifully with the history of this part of the world’ Sunday Express
Travelling Fearlessly
In 1992, I started working for a strange but beguiling organization. The Royal Society of Literature was, in those days, housed in a huge, dilapidated mansion in Bayswater, and it was there that its...
Read more
