SOURCE: Mannes-Abbott, Guy. “Return to the Wild East.” Independent (2 October 1999): 9.

In the following review, Mannes-Abbott argues that Thubron's descriptions of natural landscapes in In Siberia are “exceptional.”

In the early 1980s, Colin Thubron drove his Morris Marina across the Western face of Brezhnev's bankrupt Soviet Union. His account of that visit, Among the Russians, began “I had been afraid of Russia ever since I could remember.” Although that predictable Western apprehension melted during encounters with the Russians themselves, he was chased out of the country by the KGB.

In that first account, Siberia was “the forbidding heart of this whole continent” and lent an “invisible enormity to everything.” Almost 20 years later, after two further explorations of Asia—Behind the Wall and The Lost Heart of Asia—Thubron confronts his realm of “indelible fear” in this new book [In Siberia].

Siberia is a place of legendary bleakness and mystery...