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Red Plenty

Francis Spufford

What would have happened if the Soviet ‘miracle’ had worked, and the communists had discovered the secret to prosperity, progress and happiness?

29 in stock

£10.99£9.99
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571225248
Date Published
07.07.2011
Delivery
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Summary

‘Bizarre and quite brilliant.’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

‘Thrilling.’ Michael Burleigh, Sunday Telegraph

‘Francis Spufford has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature.’ Nick Hornby

The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on 20th-century magic called ‘the planned economy’, which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche and sputniks would lead the way to the stars. And it’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

FrancisSpufford

Francis Spufford is the author of five highly-praised works of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either ‘bizarre’ or ‘brilliant’, and usually as both. His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the…

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