This book is fantastic! It told a number of beautiful stories concurrently, not just the history of some truly beautiful instruments, but also the people involved in the history of those instruments, and the history of Siberia - a bewildering place that I will never not find interesting. Highly recommended!

I didn't know much about Siberia so this was a bit of an eye-opener for me. A fascinating and well-written book that draws you in to the story from the start. I didn't expect it to be a page turner, but it was.
Recommended read.

I had no idea that Siberia's history was as fascinating as it is. This book revealed so much to me. I knew nothing of the gulag system. How harsh, even depraved they were. We learned about places, people, music & art. This book wasn't really about pianos at all, it cover so much more. It was intriguing in every way and has left me with a hunger to learn so much more about this fascinating country.

This was absolutely fascinating. I could easily have read this down in one gulp but I really enjoyed savouring each chapter. Oddly, the musical part of this was the least interesting part for me, although it was not dull. What was fascinating and rewarding was feeling the author falling in love with Siberia with every chapter. Her passion for the country and the people and their stories was so absorbing and I learned so much without having that awful 'school' feeling ever. It made me want to go and read all the books she details in the index and find out more. Richly rewarding.

My perfect non-fiction narrative comes from a place of insatiable curiosity, openness and wonder. A book where-in trying to discover one thing, you end up discovering a multitude. A process via which looking for lost classical pianos in Siberia can only be answered by telling the history of Siberia, and therefore Russia, and also a history of pianos, and musicians in Siberia, and Russo-Japanese/Chinese/US relations and....

So yes, I adored this, despite an initial scepticism about its genesis (the author being told that a Mongolian pianist would sound better on a Siberia piano is thin but works). But Sophy Roberts is a very infectious travel companion, lightly laying on the realities of her process (translators, fixers and an aside about the horrific mosquitoes explaining the mostly winter tone of the book). And for something with seemingly such a niche appeal, the three years of travel and research (which I hope was buoyed by plenty of other work) deserves to be read by as many people as possible. I thought I had a fair assessment of Russian history, but it is interesting how when seen through art and luxury commodities how much more real that history becomes. Pianos became popular due to Catherine The Great, and musical superiority and equality was also something that the communists kept up. But this is Siberia, a land of exiles and state imprisonment so even though she knows how it will affect her story, Roberts also knows these terrible stories of Gulag orchestras and the like must be told too.

Structured beautifully, the history is broadly chronological, as befits the size of the place the geography is all over the shop. So we go from (and across) the Mongolian border, to the Urals to the tiny dotted Pacific islands south of Vladivostock which are all still part of Siberia. She manages an emotional narrative too, even when the story is of lost pianos, lost and killed families and the cruelty of various regimes, she leaves us with two stories of hope. Getting the piano to its final destination is almost an afterthought, which admittedly she predicted at the the start, but that's OK. She's gone through hundreds of years of history, over the largest landmasses in the world, and been closed down by the Russian security forces (she deadpans that UK/Russia relations were not at their best in 2018). On the way she made me listen to Shostakovich, Liszt, watch four movies set in Siberia and order three books on her bibliography, and listen to the final performance on one of those pianos mentioned in the text on the associated website. And incredible debut and one of the best bits of non-fiction I've ever read,