Recounts the adventures of an American entrepreneur in Siberia, where he and Russian partner built a multi-million dollar company, and offers insightsnto the life in Novosibirsk.

Recounts the adventures of an American entrepreneur in Siberia, where he and Russian partner built a multi-million dollar company, and offers insightsnto the life in Novosibirsk.

The art of Siberia is a fascinating subject, and the artifacts discovered in the hidden archives of the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg are nothing less than extraordinary. Artwork, day-to-day subjects and photos dating from the turn of the century all represent the testimonies of the Siberian people who refused to yield to the hegemony of a modern world.

A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again. With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.

No railway journey on Earth can equal the Trans-Siberian between Moscow and Vladivostock. It is not just its vast length and the great variety of the lands and climes through which it passes. It is not just its history as the line that linked the huge territories which are Russia together. It is a dream which calls countless travellers to the adventure of the longest railway in the world. From the birth aboard of Rudolf Nureyev to the childhood obsession with the railway of Lesley Blanch, to the weariness that eventually overcame Paul Theroux, to the excitement of the author's own journey, this revised and updated collection of travellers' accounts brings together emotions, descriptions and humour from a century of travel. This new edition of a classic anthology takes us through the tremendous achievement of the railway’s construction across harsh, unsettled lands through the earliest journeys of Western travellers and the trains on which they travelled, and their descriptions of fellow travellers, food, scenery, domestic arrangements, adventures on and off the train, convicts, revolution and war as the train carried them through a lonely, lovely landscape. The barrier of Lake Baikal was crossed by a British-built ice-breaker, put together on the lakeside until the link around the deep water and through the first tunnels of the route was completed. The railway played – and still plays – a huge part in holding this vast country together.