In Siberia

As mysterious as it is beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Siberia is a land few Westerners know, and even fewer will ever visit. Traveling alone, by train, boat, car and on foot, Colin Thubron traversed this vast territory, talking to everyone he encountered about the state of the country and what it is like to live there. He found a land brimming with majestic beauty, whose natural resources have been savagely exploited for decades; a terrain tainted by nuclear waste but filled with citizens who both welcomed him and fed him - despite their own tragic poverty. From Mongolia to the Arctic Circle, from Rasputin's village in the west through tundra, taiga, mountains, lakes, rivers, and finally to a derelict Jewish community in the country's far eastern reaches, Colin Thubron penetrates a little-understood part of the world in a way that no writer ever has.