Industry of Souls Book

The painful emergence of modern Russia from the shadow of the Soviet Union over the last decade has provided many stories of incredible suffering, deprivation and loss. Martin Booth's The Industry of Souls offers one particularly unique dimension of this traumatic history. Booth's novel tells the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British businessman falsely arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and sentenced to 20 years hard labour in the gulag. Freed in the 1970s, Bayliss--known as Shurik, the diminutive for Alexander--makes his way to the village and family of his closest friend in the gulag. With its gentle wisdom and elegiac tone, the novel traces the events of Bayliss's 80th birthday as he moves through the village he has come to call his home, recounting in flashback the incredible camaraderie of his horrific years in the gulag and struggling with the sudden reappearance of his long-forgotten life in England. The Industry of Souls is a wise and moving parable of personal acceptance in the face of the nightmare of modern history; probably an outside shot for the Booker Prize, but a telling story not only of personal suffering, but also the extent to which the shadow of Stalin's regime still looms over today's Russia and its people. --Jerry BrottonRead More