The Industry of Souls - Softcover

The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s. Presumed dead by the British Government, he survives 20 years in a Soviet Labour Camp. Eventually freed from the gulag in the 1970s he finds that has no reason to return to the West - he has become Russian in everything but birth. He finds his way to the home of his best friend at the Camp - Kirill - who he had to kill with his bare hands. He is taken in by Kirill's daughter and eventually becomes a local schoolmaster - much loved by all the village. Now on his 80th birthday Russia is changed. Communism has evaporated. In the aftermath his existence has come to light and a nephew is coming to visit him from England. The story moves from this day to his past in the camp and his life in the village. And it ends with him having to make a choice, perhaps for the first time in his life ...This is a power and dramatic novel that spans fifty years of Soviet history, capturing the repression and fear of the Stalinist period and the enthusiasm and sense of bewilderment that followed the eventual end of Communist rule.

Martin Booth has written eleven novels and two children's novels. Film options have been sold on four of these. His most cosmmercially successful novel was Hiroshima Joe (19986) which sold more than 350,000 copies. In addition to his fiction Martin Booth has written six non-fiction books including most recently The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle - a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - for Hodder & Stoughton and Opium: A History for Simon & Schuster. He has written several documentary wildlife programmes for the BBC including a number for Wildlife on One - narrated by David Attenborough. An inveterate traveller he frequently broadcasts for the BBC on From our Own Correspondent and is a specialist contributor to the Sunday Times on South East Asian matters.