Why a Booktrail?
The Cold War – One of the most remote locations we have ever come across in a novel – an underground Russian research station in the Siberian wilderness..
Kolymsky Heights
What you need to know before your trail
Kolymsky Heights – so secret it’s not even supposed to exist. It’s located somewhere in the Siberian wilderness. So remote and secret that scientists there are not allowed to leave, But one man is desperate and attempts to get a message to the outside world. He sends a message, plea to the one man he hopes can do what he can to help him a man who can achieve the impossible. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
Travel Guide
“The sandwiched layers of ice, about seventy centimetres in depth, allowed only the most opaque view from above…..”
And so begins the descent into the most remote setting of Siberia and the secret underground bunker containing Russian secrets….
Savage is a good word to describe this setting and the sense of confusion, excitement and extreme apprehension as you descend in to this novel not knowing what you will find there and what you will see.
Siberia is a landscape of isolation, cold, raw and brutal isolation where animals have tusks and aren’t like anything you’ve seen before. The dark not only envelops you but engulfs everything in its path and everything is harsh and desolate.
Welcome to Kolymsky Heights
The isolated place with the very bad weather
The ideal person to try and get inside this place is Dr Johnny Porter – a Gitxsan Indian as well as a Canadian professor of anthropology who speaks several languages (Korean, Russian and Japanese) as well as the dialects of many tribes based in Northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia. His task, to get into this lace and gather intelligence seems to be the most impossible mission ever undertaken.
Johnny has had quite a journey to get here – having worked as a sailor on a Japanese fishing boat, he arrive s for his Siberian mission, knowing that the Russian security service will be hot on his tail.
Just some of the locations in the story? Green Cape – Nagasaki – Murmansk – Kispiox and of course the Kolyma region.
The detailed picture of life in the Kolyma region is impressive – imagine the research and the imagination needed for that!
And those who live in this settings? The Russian Far East is home to many peoples such as the Evenks and their inclusion in the novel is a real eye opener.
Where Next?
