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Review
'A work of great thoughtfulness and enterprise, it sheds a uniquely intimate light behind the facade of the new Russia.' --Colin Thubron
'Susan Richards has long been one of the very best writers on Russia. Her new book is a remarkable blend of travel and reflection, as she introduces us to the vivid gallery of people she meets in the provinces. The result is a brilliant, poignant evocation of a society in transition.' --Robert Service
'A uniquely personal chronicle, and a testament to friendship. Susan Richards's political fact-finding is set ablaze by her intimacy with the discomforts and dangers of life in these remote regions, where the magic of the natural world challenges urban degradation, and where physical deprivation coexists with a richness of belief-systems as strange as the mountains of the moon.' --Victoria Glendinning
'Susan Richards has long been one of the very best writers on Russia. Her new book is a remarkable blend of travel and reflection, as she introduces us to the vivid gallery of people she meets in the provinces. The result is a brilliant, poignant evocation of a society in transition.' --Robert Service
'A uniquely personal chronicle, and a testament to friendship. Susan Richards's political fact-finding is set ablaze by her intimacy with the discomforts and dangers of life in these remote regions, where the magic of the natural world challenges urban degradation, and where physical deprivation coexists with a richness of belief-systems as strange as the mountains of the moon.' --Victoria Glendinning
Review
'A work of great thoughtfulness and enterprise, it sheds a uniquely intimate light behind the facade of the new Russia.' - Colin Thubron; 'A uniquely personal chronicle, and a testament to friendship. Susan Richards's political fact-finding is set ablaze by her intimacy with the discomforts and dangers of life in these remote regions, where the magic of the natural world challenges urban degradation, and where physical deprivation coexists with a richness of belief-systems as strange as the mountains of the moon.' - Victoria Glendinning; 'Susan Richards has long been one of the very best writers on Russia. Her new book is a remarkable blend of travel and reflection, as she introduces us to the vivid gallery of people she meets in the provinces. The result is a brilliant, poignant evocation of a society in transition.' - Robert Service; 'Once again, Susan Richards gives a rare and wonderful evocation of ordinary lives in Russia. People fall in love, fall ill, make money, lose money; some are nobly defeated, some shamelessly successful. Each one tells us more about the lethal tides of recent Russian history than years of newspaper reports.' - Philip Marsden; 'Russia exerts a peculiar pull for English travellers...Susan Richards's version shines because she knows her subjects very well. These are stories of friendships across the miles, not just brief encounters plundered for material...This traveller's tale, with all the absorption and detail of the genre, is also the story of an entire country.' - Anne McElvoy, Evening Standard; 'Lost and Found in Russia is intense reading...bursting with good material...For a rich portrait of the new Russia, grab this off the shelf and skip all those biographies of Vladimir Putin.' - Thomas de Waal, Sunday Times; 'wonderful...Lost and Found in Russia is beautifully written, with arresting images on almost every page... It is a travelogue as rich and compelling as a novel' - Lesley Chamberlain, Independent; 'moving, sometimes perplexing, even distressing...Susan Richards combines fluency in Russian with great tact, curiosity and a capacity for friendship which overcomes the barriers that defeat most foreign attempts to chronicle post-Soviet Russia...her book, being a bottom-to-top account, is perhaps equally important [as Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia]...as admirable as it is honest'. - Donald Rayfield, Literary Review
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Susan Richards has travelled into a Russia far beyond the territory of either diplomats or journalists. She has pieced together the whole anguish of the last two decades in the most anguished society of Europe. You take history out of the book but it is living people that she has put into it. It has taken sixteen years of visiting and revisiting the same people across a huge landmass as their lives have been rendered incomprehensible even to themselves in the turmoil of the times through which they have lived. Yes, it reads like a novel, but because it gets beneath the skin of history.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
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Lost and Found in Russia uses the stories of everyday Russians to tell the story of Russia since the fall of communism in the 1990s. It draws on the experiences of Susan Richards, an experienced and accomplished journalist in the country, and paints a dismal picture of the fates of Russians since the shackles of the old regime fell.
The book's main flaw is the lack of central narrative or sense of context. Richards tells us nothing of herself or what she's doing in Russia - yet her career as a journalist and charity founder is a remarkable one. There is an assumption that the reader will be familiar with her work, particularly an earlier book - Epics of Everyday Life.
This is a curious anomaly and the result is that as a reader I cared nothing for her. Her characterization is also weak and I found it difficult to empathize with her associates - many, such as Anna, who are otherwise fascinating - whom she uses to illustrate the story of Russia's people. As a book it lacks purpose, seeming like a string of chronologically listed anecdotes. There are also some glaring errors (such as her recounting watching Portugal beat France in the 2006 World Cup semi final) that diminish its credibility further.
This isn't to say that Lost and Found in Russia is entirely without merit. Some of the stories are moving, strange, fascinating - as witness Richards' encounters with Old Believers or Russian scientists. Had she been more selective and used them in a manner reminiscent of Wendell Stevenson's magnificent `Stories I Stole' (covering similar themes in post-communist Georgia) it would have been a far better work. As they stand they just don't stack up to build a cohesive book. Instead Lost and Found in Russia seems like an unwieldy piece of magazine journalism and is ultimately an unsatisfactory experience.
The book's main flaw is the lack of central narrative or sense of context. Richards tells us nothing of herself or what she's doing in Russia - yet her career as a journalist and charity founder is a remarkable one. There is an assumption that the reader will be familiar with her work, particularly an earlier book - Epics of Everyday Life.
This is a curious anomaly and the result is that as a reader I cared nothing for her. Her characterization is also weak and I found it difficult to empathize with her associates - many, such as Anna, who are otherwise fascinating - whom she uses to illustrate the story of Russia's people. As a book it lacks purpose, seeming like a string of chronologically listed anecdotes. There are also some glaring errors (such as her recounting watching Portugal beat France in the 2006 World Cup semi final) that diminish its credibility further.
This isn't to say that Lost and Found in Russia is entirely without merit. Some of the stories are moving, strange, fascinating - as witness Richards' encounters with Old Believers or Russian scientists. Had she been more selective and used them in a manner reminiscent of Wendell Stevenson's magnificent `Stories I Stole' (covering similar themes in post-communist Georgia) it would have been a far better work. As they stand they just don't stack up to build a cohesive book. Instead Lost and Found in Russia seems like an unwieldy piece of magazine journalism and is ultimately an unsatisfactory experience.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
It's hard to believe this book isn't fiction, the creation of a brilliant novelist. How eerie to know that every word is true - the adventure of a wandering heart and insightful intelligence, befriended and often beloved by individual Russians, mostly women. Here is the true Russia which only sometimes escapes as through a veil in the international pages of our newspapers.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
disappointing
Richards' book contains a lot of fascinating and revealing material. However, a reader who has not trodden the same path cannot judge how accurate her stories are (other reviews... Read more
Published 13 months ago by C. W. Robbins
utter rubbish
Not worth reading. A subjective non story. And why such a pejorative description of people of Marx? Is it something personal?
Published 14 months ago by bookinistka
The weird and wonderful in contemporary Russia
This is a fascinating and moving account of a Russia unknown to the wider world. Russia is homogenous in some ways such as its language, education, architecture, infrastructure,... Read more
Published on 17 Sep 2009 by Geoff Crocker
A great book, and good reading.
I first heard about this book on a radio programme on Radio 4. Apart from the fact that I shall be visiting Russia next year I have always been fascinated by its life and culture... Read more
Published on 12 Sep 2009 by Mr. A. Willis
Russia unravelled
Reading this wonderful book is to embark on a mysterious journey into the remote hinterlands of Russia and Siberia. Read more
Published on 24 July 2009 by Sophie Brewster
Deep Russia
At a time when Russia is reverting to its default position of authoritarianism, it is chastening to follow the lives of individual Russians as they attempt to negotiate the... Read more
Published on 12 July 2009 by lagado
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