Episode description
James Naughtie and a group of readers talk to the renowned travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron about his account of travelling through Russia in the late 1990s, In Siberia.
It's the story of how Thubron made a 15,000-mile journey through an astonishing region - one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth. He journeyed by train, river and truck among the people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union, travelling among Buddhists and animists, radical Christian sects, reactionary Communists and the remnants of a so-called Jewish state; from the site of the last Czar's murder and Rasputin's village, to the ice-bound graves of ancient Scythians, to Baikal, the deepest and oldest of the world's lakes.
Presenter : James Naughtie Interviewed guest : Colin Thubron Producer : Dymphna Flynn
February's Bookclub choice : A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2013).