Tom Parfitt
In Russia’s Haunted Hinterland
Tom Parfitt spent almost twenty years working in Moscow as a correspondent for British newspapers. In his first book, High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland, he tells the story of a 1,000-mile walk from the Black Sea to the Caspian and across seven Russian republics. Tom undertook the walk in 2008, four years after witnessing the Beslan School siege in which 314 hostages were killed, more than half of them children. Still suffering from a recurring nightmare of a woman being told her child had died in the school, he set out across the North Caucasus with a twofold aim: to dilute his bad memories of Beslan by seeing another side of the region while simultaneously trying to understand the root causes of the violence.
