100 Books Like Kolyma Tales

As a longtime lover of Gothic literature, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on it, which became my book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. My second book on the Gothic, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides, explored how French and British Gothic authors influenced each other. The City Mysteries novels were part of that influence, as evidenced by how British author Reynolds borrowed the idea to write The Mysteries of London from French author Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris. After reading so many City Mysteries novels, I decided to write my own, complete with crossdressers, prostitutes, criminals, innocents, and the genre’s many other signature elements.

The first time I left home, at 21, I ran out of money after three months, but I was so dead set on staying abroad that I pushed on. I ended up being gone for 18 months and traveled through 40 countries. Before I turned 30, I completed 10 six-month trips abroad, each with a long overland journey built-in, and hit close to 100 countries. Most of my travel was in the last decade before cell phones and the internet. I’ve been a member of The Explorers Club for twenty+ years and chair its Southwest Chapter.

I have chosen this area of literature because I enjoy expanding my horizons. I love to find out about stories from different cultures and different times that will open my eyes to things I would never have thought about before. The depth of the writing is important to convey the emotions felt by the characters. This is what inspires me in my writing and my book that I have chosen to highlight here is also a story of historical fiction, influenced by my experience of living in Slovakia and finding out from residents about how incredibly different life had been in their country.

I have chosen this area of literature because I enjoy expanding my horizons. I love to find out about stories from different cultures and different times that will open my eyes to things I would never have thought about before. The depth of the writing is important to convey the emotions felt by the characters. This is what inspires me in my writing and my book that I have chosen to highlight here is also a story of historical fiction, influenced by my experience of living in Slovakia and finding out from residents about how incredibly different life had been in their country.

I have been fascinated by the Gulag since reading the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in high school and then living for several months in Magadan, Russia, one of the “capitals” of the Gulag. The Gulag combined utopian dreams and stark violence; it was shrouded in many layers of secrecy; and it served, ultimately, as a microcosm of the Soviet Union. It is one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century, and its legacies are alive and well in Vladimir Putin’s Russia today. It can be an emotionally draining topic at times, but it also illustrates, through thousands of individual stories, humankind’s capacity for resiliency, goodness, love, and hope. 

Lynne Viola is a University Professor of Russian history at the University of Toronto. Educated at Barnard and Princeton, she has carried out research in Russian and Ukrainian archives for over 30 years. Among her books, are two dealing with Stalinist repression: Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine and The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements. Both are based on work in previously classified archives, including the archives of the political police.

I have been fascinated by the Gulag since reading the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in high school and then living for several months in Magadan, Russia, one of the “capitals” of the Gulag. The Gulag combined utopian dreams and stark violence; it was shrouded in many layers of secrecy; and it served, ultimately, as a microcosm of the Soviet Union. It is one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century, and its legacies are alive and well in Vladimir Putin’s Russia today. It can be an emotionally draining topic at times, but it also illustrates, through thousands of individual stories, humankind’s capacity for resiliency, goodness, love, and hope. 

I’m the author of multiple middle grade and YA historical novels, including Torch, which won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature. Torch takes place in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and it is especially timely in the face of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Bear (a popular symbol of the Russian Empire) has mauled many of its neighbors in the past century, not only Czechoslovakia and Ukraine but also the Baltic countries that, like Ukraine, were incorporated into the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European countries that were part of the Soviet bloc until the fall of Communism in 1989. 

As part of Gen X, I was raised by a strong mother and surrounded by steely southern women, transforming their lives from housewives to more liberated women during the turbulent 1970s as women’s rights and civil rights blossomed. I admired second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem and attended women’s studies courses in college. I was steeped in change, optimism, and hope for a better world for all. But this awareness was rooted in a critical eye to the past injustices and an understanding that the personal is the political, and how women live their lives, what obstacles they face, and how they handle them, is a testament to their power at home and in society. 

I am the author of six espionage books, 5 featuring allied spy, Eva Molenaar operating at the highest levels of Hitler’s Reich. The 6th The Road of a Thousand Tigers, is my homage to le Carre and Ian Fleming. I have loved the spy genre since I first read The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers and grew up seeing every Bond movie since The Man with the Golden Gun at the cinema.