PRIZES to win! PROMOTIONS
Engineers of the Soul is a brilliant fusion of travel writing and Soviet history by one of Europe's most gifted young writers. Frank Westerman was born in 1964 and lived and worked in Moscow from 1997 to 2002 as correspondent for the leading Dutch NRC Handelsblad newspaper. Westerman is the author of five books. His work has been published in more than ten languages and has won many prizes.
Brilliant, illuminating and rich * Literary Review * An extraordinarily compelling, imaginative and subtle mixture of history, literary criticism and travelogue * History Today * Westerman completes a portrait at once engaging and devastating. As such, it comes closer than any conventional literary history to defining the elusive Socialist Realism. * Independent * Westerman is a very fine writer and his stories, characters and digressions are as delicately wrought as a watch mechanism. Like Bruce Chatwin and the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, he has elevated the authorial journalist-traveller into a brilliant, magic storyteller; like them he seeks out the smaller, human-sized epics that play out their tragedies against the backdrop of history * Sunday Times * A compelling combination of literary criticism and travelogue * Scotland on Sunday *
