Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe [Paperback]

'Crazy, charming, a delight' --John le Carré

'The most extraordinary debut in travel writing since "In Patagonia". A dark, sardonic and brilliant book which grows in stature with every page.' --William Dalrymple

'As an allegory it is powerful and frequently moving. As a tale it is tremendous fun. It is also a thing of beauty' --Jan Morris

In Rory MacLean s groundbreaking debut travel book, Winston the pig drops on to Uncle Peter s head and kills him dead. It is a distressing end to a distinguished Soviet spy. Unwilling to be left alone in her house aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and a vivacious eccentric, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out on one last ride. The Berlin Wall fell only weeks before and Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and rediscover her remarkable east European family. In a rattling Trabant the unlikely trio puff and wheeze across the changing continent, following the threads of memory. Zita s relations - the angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who buried Stalin s nose, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose ends of her life. They picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin s embalmer. They carry a long-lost corpse over the Carpathian mountains. Their surreal and darkly comic journey becomes Zita s catharsis. Through war and revolution, decay and regeneration, Stalin s Nose is an exhilarating ride from the Baltic to the Black Sea, between Berlin and Moscow, and a portrait of Europe like no other.

Rory MacLean's books, including best-sellers Stalin's Nose (Harper Collins 1992) and Under the Dragon, have challenged and invigorated travel writing, and - according to the late John Fowles - are among works that 'marvellously explain why literature still lives'. He has won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work prize and an Arts Council Writers' Award, was twice shortlisted for the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Prize and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 and 4. Born and educated in Canada, he lives with his family in Dorset. Rory MacLean is one of the most strikingly original and talented travel writers of our generation. Katie Hickman.