The People's Act Of Love
James Meek
Available as Paperback, eBook
The international bestseller; longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Ondaatje Prize
1919, Siberia.
Deep in the unforgiving landscape a town lies under military rule, awaiting the remorseless assault of Bolsheviks along the Trans-Siberian railway. One night a stranger, Samarin, appears from the woods with a tale of escape from an Arctic prison, insisting a cannibal is on his trail. Only Anna, a beautiful young widow, trusts his story. When a local shaman is found dead, suspicion and terror engulf the isolated community, which harbours a secret of its own …
“A quite extraordinary novel … the language is so fresh and crisp and sparkling. And what a narrative! What a story!”
Philip Pullman
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“Magnificent and beautifully written … such a truly Russian novel, with its huge horizons, it is an exceptional event in English literature”
Antony Beevor
“Spellbinding. Though set in the past, this feels like the most contemporary fiction you’ll ever read … A truly great read”
Irvine Welsh
guardian
“Has the strangeness and clarity of a dream. This is historical fiction that transcends the genre – as intense as a thriller, imagined on an epic scale”
the Times
“The best and most original book that I have read for years”
Louis De BerniÈres
James Meek
James Meek is the author of six novels including The People’s Act of Love which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Award. It has been published in more than thirty countries. Meek’s latest novel The Heart Broke In was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and he has also written two collections of short stories and a book of non-fiction, Private Island, which won the 2015 Orwell Prize. He is a Contributing Editor to the London Review of Books and writes regularly for the Guardian and New York Times. He lives in London.
