The Red Wake

Kurt Johnson's debut is a fantastic hybrid of journalism and travel-writing through atrophying Soviet satellite states.

Gleebooks Gleaner

The Red Wake blends travel and history in Johnson’s own journalistic style. His careful balance gives readers enough context to appreciate the significance of the sites and cities he visits, and enables him to create a portrait of the both the historic USSR and its long shadow. Johnson uses descriptive, inventive language (he compares one building to a ‘giant, repressive cake’) to take readers to places that are more challenging or radioactive than the average traveller might be inclined to visit. In the process he provides a fascinating account of the unsettled fallout of the Soviet social and political experiment.

Ashley Kalagian Blunt, Newtown Review of Books

Kurt Johnson's extensive journey through contemporary Russia and its old satellites is a vivid portrait of how the ghost of that order still haunts the present. But it is also underpinned by a strong family tale, his grandparents having fled communist Czechoslovakia, part of the story taking place in the family's substantial old summer house with the Kafka-esque name, the Castle. He visits the last existing gulag and the ex-KGB headquarters in Moscow. The writing ... has an evocative immediacy, is historically informed and nuanced, ideologically alert and alive to Western narratives and Russian revisionist nostalgia.

Steven Carroll, The Age