... melodious.

[Roberts'] travels are bold and sociable, and our vicarious pleasure.

Much of The Lost Pianos of Siberia consists of neat summaries of major events in Russian history.

...a richly absorbing account of Siberia over the last 250 years, as Roberts zigzags her way from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s far east.

The book recounts several wild goose chases and dead ends and visits to places, such as the disputed Kurile Islands, where there never was any hope of finding a piano. But no matter: the pianos are an excuse to travel to far-off places, indulge oneself in history, meet interesting people and tell stories, all of which Robert does with abandon.

To say that Sophy Roberts’ The Lost Pianos of Siberia is among the unexpected works of history in recent memory is an understatement.

The origins of this title’s 'lost pianos' start with the mass manufacture of the instruments in Russia beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Their production was inspired, English travel writer Roberts writes, by a national fever dream over the arrival—more pointedly, the playing—of Franz Liszt in St. Petersburg in 1842. With the banishment of millions of Russians over the decades to tsarist prisons, later gulags, in the unimaginably vast Siberian expanse, the pianos followed, establishing cultural beachheads that Roberts seeks out here in digressive, hopscotch fashion, with a passion bordering on obsessive.

British journalist Roberts makes an engaging book debut with a chronicle of her travels through Siberia searching for pianos.

In this luminous travelogue, journalist Roberts travels through Siberia looking for historically significant pianos, which she sees as symbols of civilization, refinement, and artistic freedom amid vast, frigid wildernesses and primitive settlements scarred by Russia’s bloody revolutions and barbaric gulags. Her quest also serves as a vehicle for her to investigate Siberia’s dramatic past.