Publisher's Synopsis
'There were four of us travelling to Siberia together: Otto, a German photographer on a mission of his own, who was Jewish; Mischa, a member of the agency, who had spent some time in India and was almost certainly godless; me, as British as a Bath bun and a lapsed member of the Church of England; and lastly Wanda, my wife, a Slovene and a Roman Catholic, who dislikes mass in the vernacular and whose observations during our long journey together in the two-berth "soft-class" compartment of the Rossiya were interesting to record. Put all these unlikely ingredients in the same compartment, stir in a bottle and a half of vodka, leave to simmer for a couple of hours, light the blue touch paper and stand clear!' The only continuous land route between Western Europe and the Pacific coast of the former USSR, the Trans-Siberian Railway covers nearly a hundred degrees of longitude, seven time zones and 5,900 miles in a journey lasting 192 hours and 35 minutes. Terrorized by awesome Soviet conductresses, hindered at every station by officialdom and bureaucracy and hampered by the lack of palatable food and drink, Eric Newby's party none the less heroically completed the journey from Moscow to Nakhodka in 1977. The result is The Big Red Train Ride, a book full of irreverent detail and an unstinting sense of humour. 'The best kind of travel book . . . it awakened frosty demons in me, and memories I had thought forgotten' Paul Theroux.
