'Will someone pay for the spilled blood? No. Nobody.' Mikhail Bulgakov wrote these words in Kiev during the turmoil of the Russian Civil War. Since then Ukrainian borders have shifted constantly and its people have suffered numerous military foreign interventions that have left them with nothing. As a state, Ukraine exists only since 1991 and what it was before is controversial among its people as well as its European neighbours. Writing in a simple and vivid way, Jens Muhling narrates his encounters with nationalists and old Communists, Crimean Tatars and Cossacks, smugglers, archaeologists and soldiers, all of whose views could hardly be more different. Black Earth connects all these stories to convey an unconventional and unfiltered view of Ukraine - a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and the centre of countless conflicts of opinion.

PRAISES FOR A JOURNEY INTO RUSSIA; 'There is a shock of discovery and a shot of pleasure on every page.' The Times; 'A compelling story of an author's journey into deepest Siberia in a quest to meet a woman determined to remain cut off from the outside world' Sunday Telegraph; 'A Journey Into Russia [...] takes Jens Muhling into Russia's riven terrain from Kiev and Moscow to St Petersburg and Siberia and on towards the people of the Steppes, unveiling individual tales of people surviving against the odds.' The Scotsman; '[Muhling] meets a bewildering variety of "old believers" in a broader sense, from members of the sectarian Orthodox Church..., through stubbornly Leninist former Soviet citizens, to newly minted Slavonic pagans. They all want to tell Muhling their life stories which, in his empathetic retelling, provide glimpses into other lives that are vivid and frequently moving.'TLS

Jens Muhling was the editor of a German newspaper in Moscow for two years, and has been working for the Berlin newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, since 2005. His features and essays on Eastern Europe have won him several awards. He is the author of A Journey into Russia (2014) and Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea (2021).