The best books about Moscow

Find fresh ways to move beyond fear and into curiosity, confidence, and hope in this supportive journal. This calming and comforting companion is filled with insightful prompts to help you honor your feelings, shift your perspective, and feel like yourself again.

Whether you’re new to the world of anxiety or a longtime traveler in the land of the unknown, this hand-drawn and heartfelt journal will prompt you to turn the page to a fresh start.

This collection of twenty-four short stories explores unknown but vaguely familiar worlds. Charting the frontier between the real and the illusory, Seven Cries of Delight celebrates offbeat independent human curiosity, the unorthodox spirit of Renaissance enquiry into the nature of things, and its exposition in fiction unfettered by either convention or doctrine.

In this sweeping history, Steven Marks tells the fascinating story of how Russian figures, ideas, and movements changed our world in dramatic but often unattributed ways.

On Europe’s periphery, Russia was an early modernizing nation whose troubles stimulated intellectuals to develop radical and utopian alternatives to Western models of modernity. These provocative ideas gave rise to cultural and political innovations that were exported and adopted worldwide. Wherever there was discontent with modern existence or traditional societies were undergoing transformation, anti-Western sentiments arose. Many people perceived the Russian soul as the antithesis of the capitalist, imperialist West and turned to Russian ideas for inspiration and even salvation.

In December 2013, David Satter became the first American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the Cold War. The Moscow Times said it was not surprising he was expelled, "it was surprising it took so long." Satter is known in Russia for having written that the apartment bombings in 1999, which were blamed on Chechens and brought Putin to power, were actually carried out by the Russian FSB security police.

In this book, Satter tells the story of the apartment bombings and how Boris Yeltsin presided over the criminalization of Russia, why Vladimir Putin was chosen as his successor, and how Putin has suppressed all opposition while retaining the appearance of a pluralist state. As the threat represented by Russia becomes increasingly clear, Satter's description of where Russia is and how it got there will be of vital interest to anyone concerned about the dangers facing the world today.

Weeks after her fifteenth birthday, Abby lost her family, her friends, and her home in one fell night. Now alone in a post-apocalyptic America, she must journey West to find civilization. But a bitter winter is setting in all around her, and violent psychopaths and hordes of the undead stand in her way.

And even if Abby can escape this lawless wild of monsters and madness, the shadows of the past are not so easily abandoned...

Avis Dolphin is an unforgettable novel inspired by the true account of a young girl on the ill-fated Lusitania. It’s also a story of friendship, courage, and resilience set amidst war and unexpected terror.

Dingo Flats hasn't been the same since the Murphy family moved back to town. The boys are delinquents, the daughter's a disgrace, and old Granny Murphy is constantly causing trouble. Even the dogs are delinquents. The crime rate's doubled since they arrived. And what's with all the dead rats that have started appearing on the doorsteps of local businesses? The tabloid thinks it's a plague, but Sam's dad is convinced it's warnings from the Mafia. 

Meanwhile, Sam's friends are determined to make her over and marry her off, and she's staring down the barrel of having to give up her police dog pup. What's a cop to do?

For the first years after I moved to Colorado, my impractical strategy for overcoming homesickness was to avoid any music or books that inspired nostalgia. Thirty years later however, music seems to me a powerful way to connect past and present, triggering memories at the same time as it offers new experiences. When  I was unable to travel to England during the COVID-19 pandemic, I turned to the music and lives of composers whose relationships to home and travel shaped the pursuit of their craft—Antonín Dvořák, Béla Bartók, and Benjamin Britten. Distant Melodies tells the stories of their American sojourns as they try to reconcile new surroundings with nostalgia for their homelands. The backdrop is my own changing relationship to England, Elgar’s music, and the idea of home. 

It is 1948 and Lane Winslow is visiting an elderly Russian friend in beautiful sleepy New Denver when she meets a veteran of the US 104th, a member of the long-forgotten Indigenous Sinixt Nation returning to his homeland. They stumble on a shallow grave in the friend’s garden…is it the railroad baron missing since 1921? Her husband, Inspector Darling of the Nelson police investigates under a cloud of suspicion and vicious gossip that he is on the take. The action spirals into deadly violence and arson, imperiling everyone connected with the case.

“Whishaw nicely pulls off the dynamics of small-town life while maintaining suspense. Maisie Dobbs and Phryne Fisher fans will be pleased.” - Publisher’s Weekly.  “Excellent.” - Toronto Star

When David Satter arrived in the Soviet Union in June 1976 as the correspondent of the Financial Times of London, he entered a country that resembled a giant theater of the absurd. From 1976 to 1982, the Soviet Union was at the height of its world power and its people were in thrall to an absurd ideology. With the advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Soviet population was liberated from the ideology and the state hurtled to its inevitable collapse. When independent Russia emerged, the failure to replace the missing ideology with genuine moral values led to Russia’s complete criminalization.

The articles in this unique collection are a chronicle of Russia from the day David Satter arrived in the Soviet Union until the present. He was banned in 1982, allowed back during perestroika, and finally expelled from Russia in 2013 on the grounds that Russian intelligence regarded his presence as “undesirable.” He is the only American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the end of the Cold War.