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Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford - £10.99  Faber and Faber (2011)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780571225248 | ISBN 10: 0571225241

Once upon a time in the Soviet Union...
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Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called �the planned economy�, which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the 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.
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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, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It�s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. It�s history, it�s fiction. It�s a comedy of ideas, and a novel about the cost of ideas.
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By the award-winning (and famously unpredictable) author of The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys, Red Plenty is as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant - and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

(Price & availability last checked: April 2019)