THE LOST PIANOS OF SIBERIA by Sophy Roberts

I knew I would l love this unusual book - it has everything I adore in a book  - travel, social history, music, discovery, wonder, pathos, more music, fascinating people and their stories, a tormented and desolate landscape. And a brilliant writer, telling her own story of months and months travelling through the extremely unglamorous, uncomfortable, unappealing land that we know of as Siberia. Always looking for pianos. And dealing with the bureaucracy. I had no idea how important the piano was to Russian society at all levels over the past couple of hundred of years. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Russians took to the piano in droves, it being normal and almost expected that every household have a piano. The classical music repertoire overflows with words by Russian composers, and brilliant musicians, still going on now. And somehow hundreds and hundreds of pianos ended up in Siberia too. The banishment and exile of thousands began long before the days of Stalin, the pianos accompanying the punished to their new and gruelling life. In all the despair and horribleness of the gulag and the basic settlements that evolved in Siberia, the sound of a piano playing, plus the joy and escape of being able to play would surely have calmed the Russian soul.

The story of how the author came to find herself on this odyssey is also amazing. By chance she meets a very talented young Mongolian pianist, and with a bit of encouragement from others decides to find this young woman the perfect piano, last seen somewhere in Siberia. So off she goes. A detailed map at the beginning of each chapter has the author in a different part of Siberia - every map looks the same, but if you look carefully you can see where she goes. Her search takes her into some of the coldest places on earth where in the not too distant past gulags existed, with appalling stories of how cruel humans are to each other, and yet the spirit of survival and hope continues to flourish. She goes to towns and communities where music has thrived for decades, where Russian jazz began, where talented and extraordinary people have made their lives, many actually choosing to live there. She goes to Ekaterinburg where the last Russian Tsar and his family were executed, searching for the piano that the Tsarina had with her while imprisoned. 

And so on, and so on. Every chapter, town, community with another story about a piano, the people who built it, played it, how it got to Siberia, where it is now, the love that the Russian people have for music, how it is played and listened to, how it feeds the Russian soul. One of the best books for me this year.