Shortlisted for the 2015 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. For the last ten years, journalist Jens Mühling has been traveling through Russia in search of stories that appear unbelievable: a hermit from the Taiga who only recently discovered there was a world beyond the woods; a mathematician who believes a thousand years of Russian history to be a fairy tale; a priest who ventures into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to preach to those that stubbornly remain there. Mühling shows us a country whose customs, contradictions, absurdities, & attractions are still largely unknown beyond its borders.