Martin Booth has written eleven novels and two children's novels. Film options have been sold on four of these. His most cosmmercially successful novel was Hiroshima Joe (19986) which sold more than 350,000 copies. In addition to his fiction Martin Booth has written six non-fiction books including most recently The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle - a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - for Hodder & Stoughton and Opium: A History for Simon & Schuster. He has written several documentary wildlife programmes for the BBC including a number for Wildlife on One - narrated by David Attenborough. An inveterate traveller he frequently broadcasts for the BBC on From our Own Correspondent and is a specialist contributor to the Sunday Times on South East Asian matters.
As he wakes up on his 80th birthday, Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen who spent 25 years in a Soviet gulag after being charged with espionage and the next 20 years in the Russian village of Myshkino, has a major decision to make: Will he remain in the village or return home to England, where his family has just discovered that he is alive? Through flashbacks to the gulag, Booth (Opium: A History) introduces Bayliss's fellow workers, from Dimitri, who always has a story or a joke, to Yuli, who is terrified that the coal mine they are working in will collapse, to Kirill, the leader who points Bayliss to Myshkino and in doing so portrays the human side of gulag life. Interspersed with this material is an account of Bayliss's experiences in Myshkino detailing the people he has come to know and how the collapse of the Soviet Union affected them. Relying on strong character development, this intriguing work illuminates the social, political, and economic changes the downfall of communism brought to Russia while remaining readable, personal, and suspenseful. Highly recommended.ÄJoshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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