Russia Starts Here event with Howard Amos - Tuesday 25th March 2025

Join us in the bookshop to hear Howard Amos in conversation with Jen Stout about Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire.

6.30pm on Tuesday 25th March 2025 at Golden Hare Books EH3 5AQ.

Buy a copy of Russia Starts Here and receive free entry to the event, or choose our Ticket-Only option for £5 (which can be used towards a purchase of the book at the event).

About Russia Starts Here Returning to an overlooked region on the edge of Russia, Howard Amos sets out on a quest to understand the country he once called home.

On Russia’s European borderlands, people live their lives among the ruins of successive empires. Pskov, an old Slavic land of forgotten stories and faded waysides, has weathered the tides of history. Once a thriving nexus of trade and cultural exchange, today it is one of the poorest and most rapidly depopulating places of this vast nation. To understand the darkness that has captured Russia, Howard journeys through a landscape of small towns, re-wilding fields and dilapidated churches.

 This is a lyrical portrait of Russia where it meets NATO and the EU – a place of frontiers and boundaries that reveals unfamiliar and uncomfortable truths. In a country where history has been erased, manipulated and marginalised, the voices Howard spotlights are a powerful antidote against forgetting. From the last inhabitants of a dying village, to the long-term residents of a psychiatric hospital and a powerful prelate rumoured to be Putin's confessor, Howard uncovers potent stories that are shaped by violence, tragedy and loss.

About Howard Amos Howard Amos is a writer and journalist, who has been published by
outlets including The Guardian, The Associated Press, Newsweek and The New Republic. Raised in London, he spent a year living in Russia’s Pskov Region before working for almost a decade as a correspondent in Moscow. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he moved to Armenia and was appointed editor-in-chief of The Moscow Times. He now lives in Edinburgh.

About Jen StoutJen Stout is a Scottish freelance journalist who has covered the war in Ukraine for major outlets including BBC radio, London Review of Books, Prospect, and the Sunday Post. Her book, Night Train to Odesa won the First Book Prize at Scotland's National Book Awards in 2024.