Engineers Of The Soul

A compelling combination of literary criticism and travelogue

Scotland on Sunday

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

As he travels around the former-USSR talking to ordinary Russians and visiting landmarks of the Soviet era, Dutch author and journalist Frank Westerman tells the story of authors like Pasternak and Gorky, the latter considered so important to the cause, Stalin launched an undercover operation to bring him back to Russia

Glasgow Herald

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 merges investigative journalism, literary history and travel writing as he journeys across modern Russia to look at the legacy of literature under the Soviet Union... intriguing

Big Issue

Brilliant, illuminating and rich

Literary Review

The fate of Soviet writers under Stalin is movingly explored in this outstanding mix of travel book and literary study, which has about it more than a hint of Bruce Chatwin

Sunday Times

An extraordinarily compelling, imaginative and subtle mixture of history, literary criticism and travelogue

History Today

Winding his way along numerous interconnected lines of inquiry, Westerman engages the reader with ease in the surprise and satisfactions of his fascinating, often tragic, discoveries about broken human lives, forgotten books and films, a nd places the desert has reclaimed

Times Literary Supplement

Highly recommended...to wrestle travelogue, literary biography, social history and bad communist cinema into such a readable tale is a triumph

Brian Schofield, Sunday Times

While western studies have tended to focus on books that were clandestine, banned, confiscated or smuggled out of the USSR, Westerman... is more interested in the works of converts, hangers-on, backsliders and doubters. Who'd have thought a literary history of hydraulics would be so readable?

Guardian