Recommendations from our site
“Lionel Davidson was writing it before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was published shortly afterwards. In many ways, it’s a throwback, an old-fashioned Cold War novel. But it had great success when it was first published in the mid-1990s and then had a reboot here in the UK about five years ago and sold like hotcakes, largely thanks to Waterstones getting behind it. It’s a fabulous book, very detailed, very strange. It’s got a slightly ludicrous plot about a secret scientific facility in Russia and a very unusual hero: an Indigenous Canadian. It’s fantastically well written and the last third of the novel, the exfiltration out of Siberia across the Bering Strait into Alaska, is breathtaking.” Read more...
The Best Post-Soviet Spy Thrillers
Charles Cumming, Novelist
“What this book does is delve into the richness of the different cultures, into the diversity of the different peoples there, their rivalries, and where they feel united. It’s all in the context of the racism of the Russians, who never liked or seem to have respected the people of the Arctic, or even the Arctic itself, except as something to exploit. And it’s a theme that rings very true. Particularly under the Soviet Union, the different peoples of the Arctic were collectivised and there was industrialisation of the crudest kind, exploitation of minerals, and ghastly tales of the gulags. This is all up in this region that’s now going through extraordinary change with the melt opening up great competition for resources, for new shipping routes and for control.” Read more...
The best books on Environmental Change
David Shukman, Journalist
Kolymsky Heights was described by British fantasy writer Philip Pullman as “the best thriller I’ve ever read.” We’re not sure how many thrillers Philip Pullman has read, but we’ve read a lot, and agree that it’s a good one. The audiobook is read by South African-born narrator Peter Noble, who does a brilliant job of conveying the strangeness of the main protagonist and, before he appears, the opening scenes set in Oxford.
