Hooked!

A travel account, based on a fly-fishing journey across the outmost northern reaches of Russia. The journey takes Fen Montaigne from infamous gulags set in the Solovetsy Islands, to the deserted gold mines at Kolyma and the pristine waters of the tundra rivers.

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In the last days of the Soviet Union Fen Montaigne worked in Moscow as a staff correspondent for The Washington Post. Once back in the States, he longed to return, not least to a part of Russia unknown to him - the northern arc. With rivers and lakes in abundance he decided to indulge a passion and flyfish his way across the continent, from the Solovetsky Islands, 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle to the wilderness of the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian far east. Like Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar) or Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia) there was a sense of quest, a need to meet these wasteland inhabitants - these 'real Russians'. Fishing, he deduced, would also be a great adventure, as many of the rivers and lakes have been untouched by the kind of pollution that has wrecked the equivalent fishing in northern America. He was not disappointed. Hooked is a rich account of a rare journey