High Caucasus

'Outstanding' TIMES'Gripping' ECONOMIST'A thrilling, profound masterpiece' NICHOLAS CRANEEmotionally scarred after witnessing the bloody climax of the Beslan school siege in Russia's North Caucasus, in which 314 hostages died, Tom Parfitt set out on a journey. In High Caucasus, he shares his remarkable thousand-mile quest in search of personal peace - and a greater understanding of the roots of violence in a region whose fate has tragic parallels with the Ukraine of today.Starting in Sochi on the Black Sea and walking the mountains to Derbent, the ancient fortress city on the Caspian, Parfitt traverses the political, religious and ethnic fault-lines of seven Russian republics, including Chechnya and Dagestan. Through bear-haunted forests, across high altitude pastures and over the shoulders of Elbrus, Europe's highest mountain, he finds companionship and respite in the homes of proud, little-known peoples. This is a stunning story of confronting trauma through connection with history, people and place.

Tom Parfitt has written an extraordinary book, a thrilling, profound masterpiece. His curiosity, courage and empathy shine from every page. I was gripped, from start to finish, A thrilling and beautiful book. Tom Parfitt's extreme walk along Europe's wildest frontier - through the mosaic of restive statelets on the southern edge of Russia - is epic in itself, but it offers too a drill-down into the deepest layers of human experience - collective memory and individual survival, the legacy of horror and the joy of healing, Superb. Tom Parfitt is one of our great travel writers: curious, indomitable and brave. His account of his journey on foot across the North Caucasus is a masterpiece of observation and lyrical prose., With this book, Tom Parfitt has re-invented travel writing for the 21st century. He's an adventurer with a heart; a journalist who saw too much death, but who - instead of running to the next crisis - confronted the horror and crafted a testament for its victims, A remarkable story of intense experience, thoughtfulness and feeling

Tom Parfitt grew up in Norfolk and studied politics and Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. He worked for twenty years as a correspondent in Moscow for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Times. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.