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 "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 "An extraordinarily compelling, imaginative and subtle mixture of history, literary criticism and travelogue" History Today "Brilliant, illuminating and rich" Literary Review