Stalin's Meteorologist

<p><em>Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2018</em><br /><br /><strong>The beautifully illustrated, heartbreaking story of an innocent man in a Soviet gulag, told for the first time in English.</strong><br /><br />One fateful day in 1934, a husband arranged to meet his wife under the colonnade of the Bolshoi theatre. As she waited for him in vain, he was only a few hundred metres away, in a cell in the notorious Lubyanka prison. <br /><br />Less than a year before, Alexey Wangenheim - a celebrated meteorologist - had been hailed by Stalin as a national hero. But following his sudden arrest, he was exiled to a gulag, forced to spend his remaining years on an island in the frozen north, along with thousands of other political prisoners.</p> <p>By chance, Olivier Rolin discovered an album of the letters and beautiful drawings of the natural world which Alexey sent home to his wife, Varvara, and his four-year-old daughter, Eleonora. Intrigued by these images, Rolin became determined to uncover Alexey's story and his eventual horrifying fate.<br /><br /><em>Stalin's Meteorologist</em> is the thrilling and deeply moving account of an innocent man caught up in the brutality of Soviet paranoia. It's a timely reminder of the human consequences of political extremism.</p>