"The Railway" unveils Uzbek life under communism

Hamid Ismailov set up and is now head of Central Asia and Caucuses Service at the BBC World Service. An Uzbek exile since 1992 he was, along with many other Russians forced outut especially as he wanted to support democracy in eastern Europe, so the police tried to prosecute me. The BBC have been closed down in Tashkent since the Abidjan massacre last May.

"I was expelled from Uzbekistan because I was a writer and a correspondent for a literary magazine published in Russian," he said.

Now living in Barnet he has published in English translation "The Railway", a novel with a biting satirical edge that he wrote 15 years ago in Uzbekistan, but only recently translated by Robert Chandler (Ed. Penguin's superb Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida ) and published in English by Harvill Secker. Craig Murray, says, "it is an utterly readable, compelling book'.

Independent (Susha Guppy)
"scintillating novel… every strand shines…ironic, hilarious, tender...a poet’s novel, full of memorable descriptive passages and heart-wrenching asides.

New Statesman
"…skilled craftsman…brilliantly done…just drink in the novel. It is a work of rare beauty – an utterly readable, compelling book"

Literary Review
Extraordinarily rich… Handler’s preface is a superb essay.

Telegraph
"The arrival of modernity - represented by the train, the Revolution, and the Russian language - is a culture shock of incredible violence. The town's experience spills out in a series of tangled, wild tales, brutal, absurd and transformative."

Hamid Ismailov is interviewed by Marcus Dysch about fleeing his home country, and his novel and a second, as yet unpublished one here.

Order from Amazon (ISBN: 1843431610) and enjoy the lives of Mefody-Jurisprudence, the engaging alcoholic intellectual and Umarali-Moneybags, the sly old moneylender.... then ..

Hamid Ismailov and Robert Chandler will read from and talk about Hamid Ismailov's 'The Railway Line'. At the Pushkin Club ULU (The University of London Union), Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY on 23rd May 2006 at 7pm

THE CIS STATES

In the dusk of 1991 eleven ambitious communist party apparatchiks smelling the final days of empire signed the Alma - Ata declaration" which declared that the "USSR shall from now, cease to exist"... and it did. From this developed the Commonwealth of Indpendent States, Kazakstan, Kyrgistan,Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.They joined the UN,the IMF and the IMRDB and the OSCE.... the rest will be history.

Strobe Talbot the sage of Eurasia and fellow Rhodes scholar with Clinton at Oxford said, "The new states really are not independent at all,their economies and infrastructures will take years, even decades to disentangle"

A Good book to help make sense of it all is, The Central Asian States: Discovering Independence by Gregory Gleason.