- Published: 03/05/2012
- ISBN: 9781846272707
- 129x20mm
- 336 pages
White Fever
Jacek Hugo-Bader
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
This is the story of a journey like no other, as Jacek Hugo-Bader makes his way across Siberia, from Moscow to Vladivostok, in the middle of winter. Travelling alone in a modified Russian jeep, he traverses a continent that is two-and-a-half times bigger than America, awash with bandits and not always fully equipped with roads. Along the way, Hugo-Bader discovers a great deal of tragedy, but also plenty of dark humour among the reindeer shepherds, nomadic tribes, the former hippies, the shamans, and the followers of some of the many arcane religions that flourish in this isolated, impossible region.
£9.99
This gently devastating account of an odyssey is a gem.
Sunday Times Must Read
A witty, inspiring account of an odyssey from Moscow to Vladivostok, into the frozen heart of a dying continent, sparkling with vignettes of human endurance.
Iain Finlayson, The Times
A funny, enlightening and thoroughly engaging piece of reportage... Clear-eyed and curious, Hugo-Bader offers a riveting tour of this benighted land.
Financial Times
From the Same Author
Kolyma Diaries
Jacek Hugo-Bader, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world’s last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his ‘fellow travellers’, the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia
