The Lost Pianos of Siberia

An extraordinary encounter with a wildly fascinating and astonishingly ill-known region… This is a wonderful book. * Sunday Times *The ultimate quest for the oddest objects - pianos - in the most unlikely place - Siberia. But Roberts makes it much more than that, an elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book. * Paul Theroux *An impressive exploration of Siberia’s terrifying past. * Guardian *An exuberant, eccentric journey through Russian vastness, European history and Russian culture, The Lost Pianos of Siberia is a quixotic quest, a picaresque travel adventure and a strange forgotten story, all wrapped into one fascinating book. * Simon Sebag-Montefiore *What shines through in this book is Roberts’ genuine, humane affection for and fascination with the people she meets in Siberia. * Literary Review *A stunning example of modern historical travel writing * Independent *A richly observed cultural history… thrilling. * New Statesman *Fascinating account of Siberia’s horrific legacy told with great verve… Roberts is a wonderfully lyrical writer. * The Observer *Beautifully written… A unique short history of Russia from Catherine the Great to Putin… A sense of the extraordinary marks every page. * History Today *Captures Siberia’s wildness, but favours its enchantments. * Times Literary Supplement *

Sophy Roberts is an award-winning British journalist, and a regular contributor to FT Weekend. Her critically acclaimed first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year in 2020, and went on to be published in eight more languages. Her second book, A Training School for Elephants, is another unusual quest, threading lost history with modern reportage in India, Iraq, DRC, Tanzania and Belgium. Following an 1879 journey that four elephants from Pune made to Africa’s Great Lakes, it is a reckoning with colonial ambitions gone berserk.