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The 2013 Winners are In!



Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

Russia & Eastern Europe

• Russia
• Ukraine
• Baltic States
• Caucasus
• Central Asian Republics

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  A Journey to Nowhere: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Courland by Jean-Paul Kauffmann

  Price: £18.99    Add to Basket

  An erudite and engaging book - in the tradition of W.B. Sebald - about one of the world's most desolate reaches. Courland is an entity that no longer exists. Occupied by Nazi Germany and returned to Soviet Russia after the war, it remained largely inaccessible until 1991. Kauffmann roams this nowhere land of wide skies and forests, deserted beaches and ruined castles, looking for a lost lover and an excavator of tombs, and following in the footsteps of exiled Louis XVIII.

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  In Search of Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  An entertainingly offbeat travelogue. Robbins is stronger on anecdotal comedy than historical and cultural context but writes with such charm that all is forgiven.

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  Nijinsky: A Life by Lucy Moore

  Price: £25.00    Add to Basket

  The first biography for 40 years of the revolutionary ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, Lucy Moore gives us is a gripping tale of a talent which redefined an art form, as well as madness, rivalry and the price of success, with stunning illustrations. Nijinsky's life was shadowed by schizophrenia and an intense relationship with his lover Diaghilev, and Moore sympathetically and beautifully teases the man from the legend.

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  The Man Without A Face by Masha Gessen

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  A brave and revelatory account of how a low-level KGB operative came to control the world's largest country and, in an astonishingly short time, managed to reclaim the power of the Presidency and set to work consolidating the government.

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  Just Send Me Word by Orlando Figes

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  The uniquely powerful and moving story of the relationship between Lev and Sveta, two young Muscovites who were separated first by the Second World War, and then by the Gulag. But extraordinarily, the resilient pair were able to smuggle letters to each other throughout their separation, and these documents form the basis of this love story like no other.

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  Return of a King by William Dalrymple

  Price: £25.00    Add to Basket

  In the spring of 1839 British forces invaded Afghanistan for the first time. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the 19th century, a powerful army ambushed and routed by Afghan tribesmen. The parallels between this first engagement and the current crisis in Afghanistan are striking and relevant: this is history at its most urgent.

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  The Operators by Michael Hastings

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Michael Hastings, a Rolling Stone journalist, accompanied General Stanley McChrystal across Europe in 2010, watching incredulously as they splurged money on frivolities and insulted the Obama administration they were allegedly subordinate to. His article got McChrystal fired, and in his new book, The Operators, Hastings continues the dark revelations about Allied military commanders on and off of the battlefield. Essential reading for anyone concerned about the state of military affairs today.

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  Soldiers of God by Robert D. Kaplan

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  Robert Kaplan's fascinating and informative account of his time with the mujahidin and their successful mission to oust the Russian army and how this led to the rise of the Taliban. He returns in the 1990s to charter this lawless, war-ravaged territory of refugee camps and minefields.

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  Ever the Diplomat by Sherard Cowper-Coles

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Sherard Cowper-Coles last book, Cables from Kabul showed us a very different Afghan front line, that of the diplomats whose job it was to negotiate and explain Britain to the Afghans and Afghanistan to the Britons. Now, in Ever the Diplomat, Cowper-Coles takes us behind the doors of the Foreign Office to experience just what our diplomatic corps does to maintain and manage British interests around the world. From writing speeches for Thatcher to hiding an embarrassing bobble hat from Robin Cook, we are taken on a often humorous, always insightful journey through Whitehall and abroad, as the mandarins of the FCO respond to an ever shifting world.

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  The Mongols by David Morgan

  Price: £23.50    Add to Basket

  The best work on the Mongols since its first edition publication in 1986, this revised 2nd edition of David Morgans essential work is the essential starting point to learning about histories greatest land empire and dispelling the myths of the Nomadic Mongols as barbarians. A student of Middle East studies luminaries such as Anne Lambton and Bernard Lewis, Morgan guides us through the empire, from its formation on the steppes of Central Asia to its dominance, in the forms of the Golden Horde, Ilkhanate and Yuan Dynasty (in Russia, the Middle East and China respectively), of the majority of Eurasia. A must-read.

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  The Last Man in Russia by Oliver Bullough

  Price: £20.00    Add to Basket

  Oliver Bullough's colleague, a Russian reporter, drank a bottle of brandy with breakfast.
  
  Then he had a bottle of brandy in the car on the way to the Chechen front.
  
  Then stopped the car to buy a bottle of Vodka.
  
  By the end of the day, Bullough and a couple of other reporters had to cobble together a dispatch under his friends name and send it back to Moscow on his behalf.
  
  Once, this is anecdote, about Russian love of life and the travails of Russian-based journalism, but dozens, hundreds, thousands of times, it's about a nation that is sick, whose populations is dropping faster than any other, of infant mortality rates equal to underdeveloped African nations, and about a society where no one blinks when a journalist orders a bottle of brandy with his eggs in the morning.
  
  Bullough, author of Let Our Fame Be Great, a powerful travel memoir and history of Georgia, returns to give us the modern history of Russia, following in the footsteps of an Orthodox Priest from a small village, who saw the entire Russian system, from post-war Moscow, to the Siberian Gulag, KGB repression of his sermons and the nation crawling into a bottle in the 1960's and 1970's, never to crawl out. Father Dmitry exhorted his flock to love and trust one another. Is it too late for Russians to learn his lesson?

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  In The Land of White Death by Valerian Albanov

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  In 1912 Albanov's Russian exploration vessel was frozen into a polar ice cap, trapping all crew on board. For eighteen months they survived, clinging to fading hopes of rescue. Finally they set out on foot across hundreds of miles of desolate ice - only two survived. This vivid account of the ordeal, compiled from journal entries, is utterly compelling. Includes forewords from Jon Krakauer and David Roberts.

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  Coming Back by Edoardo Albinati

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  In Mar 2002, Edoardo Albinati watched as hundreds of thousands of refugees returned to Afghanistan. He describes with insight and passion their attempts to reintegrate.

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  Koba the Dread by Martin Amis

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Amis's boldest book, this facinating work addresses the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals in the Twentieth Century. Mixed with his own personal reflections is a brilliant analysis of Stalin, otherwise known as Koba the Dread.

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  Bread & Ashes: A Walk Through the Mountains of Georgia by Tony Anderson

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  An impressive journey vividly recounted. Anderson has a deep understanding and empathy for the history of Georgia and its people. Just as important, he writes beautifully.

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  Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilisation & Barbarism by Neal Ascherson

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  A rich and fascinating Eurasian history, both scholarly and readable. Ascherson traces the turbulent history of this ocean and its shores from antiquity to contemporary with great aplomb.

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  One Soldier's War in Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A gruelling account of one soldier's tour of duty in Chechnya. Babchenko is unsparing in his revelations, describing the appalling conditions, the gruesome behaviour of both sides and the horrifying duties which fell on him and his young comrades. A biography which sits alongside the best accounts of Vietnam.

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  Mission to Tashkent by F. M. Bailey

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  F. M. Bailey was an explorer and secret agent for the British. In 1918 he was sent on a nail-biting assignment shadowing the movements of the Bolshevik secret police in Central Asia. A thrilling account from a real-life James Bond.

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  Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian

  Price: £10.99    Add to Basket

  In this excellent memoir, subtitled "An American son uncovers his Armenian past", Balakian recounts his gradual awakening to the horrors of the Armenian genocide and the transformative effect it had on his identity.

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  The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A playful, enormously ambitious work that knits travel writing, observational humour and literary criticism into an engaging account of one woman’s love affair with Russian literature. The volume is much more than the sum of its parts – essays interpreting the works of Russian authors Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky – it is a defense of the book itself, a send-up of academic whimsy and a celebration of every-day absurdity.

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  For a Pagan Song by Jonny Bealby

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Travel writer and guide Jonny Bealby follows in the footsteps of Rudyard Kipling's Daniel Davrot from the Man Who Would Be King and explores Northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. A tender, heartfelt and insightful piece of travel writing from an interesting man.

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  Stalingrad by Antony Beevor

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  First published in 1998, Beevor's account of this monstrous siege is simply masterful. Unflinching in its detail, unsurpassed in its rigour, this is a superb work of narrative history.

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  Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  A fascinating collection of 10 essays by Isaiah Berlin which discuss the great Russian minds of the 19th century and their response to the social and political upheaval of the time.

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  Chasing The Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia by Tom Bissell

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  A quite brilliant travelogue by a young American, charting his journey across Uzbekistan to the ecological disaster that is the Aral Sea. Bissell is both raconteur and scholar.

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  Journey Into The Mind's Eye by Lesley Blanch

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  An intoxicating fusion of travelogue, memoir and love story, Blanch's 1968 masterpiece tells of her travels through Siberia and beyond in search of the mysterious Russian she first met as a child. Drenched in sumptuous imagery and filled with great insight, this is not to be missed.