Nikolai ran aground off the Olympic Peninsula; this novel is based on this astounding historical event and the lives of the people affected. In 1808, eighteen-year-old Anna Petrovna Bulygina is aboard the Russian ship St. Nikolai when it runs aground off on the west coast of Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula. The crew, tasked with trading for sea otter pelts and exploring the coast, are forced to shore into Indigenous territory, where they are captured, enslaved, and then traded among three different Indigenous communities. Terrified at first, Anna soon discovers that nothing—including slavery—is what she expected. She begins to question Russian imperialist aspirations, the conduct of the crew, and her own beliefs and values as she experiences a way of life she never could have imagined.Based on historical record, Anna, Like Thunder blends fact and fiction to explore the early days of contact between Indigenous people and Europeans off the west coast of North America and offers a fresh interpretation of history.

    This is perhaps the first time we have such a complete firsthand account in which nothing is kept back and there is no departmental “diplomacy.” The author is a nuclear power specialist who worked for a time at the Chernobyl AES and knows it well, just as he is personally acquainted with all the principal participants in the events. By virtue of his official position, he has attended many of the crucial conferences concerning nuclear power plant construction. Immediately after the accident, Medvedev was sent to Chernobyl and had an opportunity to learn a great deal while the trail was still fresh and to see things with his own eyes. He presents many technical details indispensable to understanding the mechanism whereby the accident occurred, he exposes the secrets of bureaucratic relations, he tells about the oversights of scientists and designers, about the disastrous overbearing pressure in the command system, about the violations of glasnost before the accident and in the emergency situation following it that have caused enormous harm. The chronicle of events at Chernobyl in the tragic days of April and May 1986 takes up the central place in the story. The author portrays the behavior and role of numerous participants in the drama, of real living people with their shortcomings and virtues, their doubts, their weaknesses, their illusions, and their heroism alongside the nuclear monster that had gone out of control. It is not possible to read about this without the deepest emotion. We knew about the exploits of the firemen. The author tells about the heroism of the electricians, the turbine specialists, the operators, and other workers at the station who prevented the accident from taking on greater proportions.

    The Zero Train has the intensity of Dostoevsky and a love affair as touching as that of Doctor Zhivago." "The setting is Siding No 9, a remote Soviet railway settlement run by the secret police and serving the so-called Zero Train. The cargo of this sealed 100-wagon train is unknown to the employees of the siding as is the train's provenance; some suspect something sinister and become obsessed by the mystery. The attempted disentanglement of the mystery, which leads to madness and murder, is at the heart of the novel. The train itself forms the basis of a dense web of symbols examining the nature of life lived in the service of an ideal neither known or understood, thus allowing The Zero Train to be read as a study of the ordinary individual under Stalin." The novel begins with Don Domino, an old man, watching a now almost deserted settlement unable to comprehend in his gathering insanity that the track is no longer there and that the Zero Train has stopped passing through. The narrative continues as a series of flashbacks which draw the reader into his life and the mysteries of the Line.

    Svidrigailov simply is the most memorable figure in the book, obscuring Raskolnikov, who after all is the protagonist, a hero-villain, and a kind of surrogate for Dostoevsky himself.

    With a mix of humor, candor, and compassion, he reveals how, years before his marriage, his self-obsession led to a downward spiral of addiction and depression, culminating in a suicide attempt at the age of twenty. Reflecting on the love and support he experienced in the aftermath, as well as on the lessons he learned from a difficult missionary stint in Russia, his time as a youth leader in the Arizona desert, his marriage, and even a story his father read to him as a child, he shares his deep conviction that the only way you can find your life is to give it away to others.

    

    Written during this time, this is the account of prison life and the people he encountered.There is the guard who delivers blows with no visible traces. The fraudster stitched up by the police for murder. The man who refuses to lie for a packet of cigarettes. The abandoned teenager, the down-and-out, the grass... He describes a hidden world of brutality and corruption, yet one where moments of humanity still manage to shine through.One in ten Russian men pass through prison at some point in their lives. This book is a denunciation of an entire system of bureaucratic criminality, and a passionate call to recognise a human tragedy.

    After exploring the depths of Moscow's “Underground Planet,” Kalder journeyed to the Ukraine to chase down demons and exorcists in the dubious afterglow of the Orange Revolution, before meeting a man called Vissarion Christ—a one-time traffic cop, he is now messiah to thousands of followers in Siberia. Salvation and damnation collide as Daniel Kalder expertly guides us through this unique account of a modern day quest that reveals the astonishing lengths people will go to when they view the world through a “strange telescope.”

    In Caucasus, award-winning author Nicholas Griffin recounts his journey to this war torn region to explore the roots of today's conflict, centering his travelogue on Imam Shamil, the great nineteenth century Muslim warrior who commanded a quarter-century resistance against invading Russian forces.Delving deep into the Caucasus, Griffin transcends the headlines trumpeting Chechen insurgency to give the land and its conflicts dimension: evoking the weather, terrain, and geography alongside national traditions, religious affiliations, and personal legends as barriers to peaceful co-existence. In focusing his tale on Shamil while retracing his steps, Griffin compellingly demonstrates the way history repeats itself.

    Shirer's new book - written in his ninth decade - explores the passionate, highly charged, and extraordinary lives of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy. It is a compelling illumination both of the nature of genius and of the universal problems of love, sex, and marriage - themes that Tolstoy played out in his great fiction and that haunted him in his tangled domestic life. Rich in anecdotes, wise, full of sweeping history, and imbued with Shirer's profound knowledge of literature and life, Love and Hatred ranks beside such works as Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra and Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage as a masterly, intuitive, and sympathetic exploration of the love/hate relationship between two famous, bigger-than-life people. Beginning in 1862, when Tolstoy committed the blunder of asking his young bride to read his diaries of his bachelor life so there should be no secrets between them, and ending with his tragic flight from home (and marriage) in 1910 while the whole world waited for news of him, Love and Hatred tells the story of a great romance between two people who could live neither together nor apart - a romance that exhausted and obsessed them both, and that forms the basis for much of Tolstoy's work. The final book of William L. Shirer's long and brilliant career, it is - appropriately - a masterly re-creation of a time, of two extraordinary people, and of the very nature of love, marriage, and old age.

    Petersburg, New Year's Eve, 1916. Marina Makarova is a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history. Swept up on these tides, Marina will join the marches for workers' rights, fall in love with a radical young poet, and betray everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn.As her country goes through almost unimaginable upheaval, Marina's own coming-of-age unfolds, marked by deep passion and devastating loss, and the private heroism of an ordinary woman living through extraordinary times. This is the epic, mesmerizing story of one indomitable woman's journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century.

    The Olympic gold medal-winning skater talks about her daughter Daria, with reflections on her own mother and grandmother, and advice for Daria.

    Still reeling from the wincing exit to Iceland in the 2016 Euros, expectations were at an all-time low. Qualification had been smooth if not spectacular, and pundits and fans alike were lukewarm about the team’s chances. Just avoiding embarrassment would have counted as some kind of success. As the tournament kicked off, a stunningly stage-managed occasion by Putin and his cronies at FIFA, we all took a deep inhale of breath and waited for the inevitable: technical ineptitude and crap penalties.How wrong we were. Over the next three weeks, as back home we dissolved in the heat, our football team gave us reason to believe. We squeaked a win against Tunisia, trounced Panama and had a great tactical defeat to Belgium to open up the draw to the final. We all bought waistcoats and eulogised Southgate’s calm, fatherly manner. We all fell in love with ‘Slabhead’, aka Harry Maguire. And we did it all to the tune of ‘It’s Coming Home’.Barney Ronay was there through the whole tournament, criss–crossing over Russia as he followed the England team, and the rest, on their quest for glory. Here, he captures the sights and sounds, the twists and turns, the bad food and the great football that contributed into making this World Cup one of the greatest of all time.

    These are only some of the marvels of the Russian estate on which Nina Karsavina grows up, surrounded by her beautiful mother, her eccentric father, her sister Katya, and the housekeeper Darya. But when her father gradually loses his sanity after the death of her mother, Nina takes the difficult decision to leave her homeland behind and marry a complete stranger. Over the next 80 years, the family will scatter across the globe in the wake of the Russian Revolution and two World Wars. It is only when Nina’s own granddaughter Julia, an artist, begins a search for her roots that the family’s tragic history can be pieced together for the first time.

    As a child, she was mesmerized by fireflies, loved the scent of white lilies and skated like the wind on Moscow's ice ponds. By the tender age of 14, aviation became her passion; by 16 she had completed her first solo flight; and, by 18 she had trained some 40 male pilots. When Hitler invaded Russia, she became the first female fighter pilot to enter the Motherland's elite all-male 437th IAP. There she flew 168 missions, downed 15 Messersmitts, fell in love with and married her commanding officer, the handsome Captain Alexi Solomatin, who subsequently perished before her eyes. Lilia was shot down for a fourth and final time on August 12, 1943, 17 days shy of her 22nd birthday near the tiny village of Marinovka, in what we now know as the Eastern Ukraine. Due to the absence of her remains at the time, the severe restrictions of post-war communism and the eventual partioning of the Ukraine itself, Lilia's exploits and sacrifices went largely unrecognized until May 5, 1990, when then President Mikhail Gorbachev awarded Lilia the country's highest honor, Hero of the Soviet Union. Today a monument and museum reside in Lilia's name in the modest town of Krasny Luch, not far from the scene of her final battle.