Fatland’s anecdotes are rich and revelatory.

All credit...to Norwegian social anthropologist and author Erika Fatland, who may have titled her central Asian travelogue Sovietistan, but who treats each of this clumsily named collective with care and attention. Part travel diary, part sociopolitical analysis, Sovietistan seeks to keep in mind the region’s ancient history—dictated to Fatland with metronomic accuracy by identikit tour guides in the various city museums—while probing what may lie ahead.

Her best reporting is about Turkmenistan, a country largely closed to independent travellers and which she presents in a refreshing three-dimensional way.

...engaging.

... offers an opportunity for sustained reflection on the region.

A colorful, often bizarre, sometimes grim journey through five Central Asian nations that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union.

... a translation of a Norwegian original which won the 2015 Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize for Nonfiction. Not, it must be said, that anything in the book gives that away: if the goal of translation is to be transparent, then Kari Dickson must be at the peak of her craft. It’s entirely colloquial; some references to Oslo aside, the only thing that gives Fatland away as something other than the otherwise expected Anglosaxon travel-writer is that in the book she communicates in Russian, German and Finnish.

Her remarkable look at the region serves as a solid introduction to an area that remains little traveled by those from the West..