The People's Act of Love by James Meek

The story starts in a university town in 1910, where two students, boy and girl, embrace the revolution and one another. He is unable to prevent her from attempting to throw a bomb; she is caught, and exiled to Siberia.
The main tale picks up nine years later in Yazyk, a remote Siberian village. Sitting on the edge of civilisation the place is home to a deranged Czech commander and his troops, men dispirited by a war that has stretched on for too long and horrors in their background they keep trying to forget. Unlike their power-hungry leader they just want to go home.
Alongside these inhabitants Yazyk has attracted a Christian cult, men and women who've castrated themselves in an attempt to become closer to God. Anna is a beautiful young war-widow, neither soldier nor cultist, who keeps her reasons for living here a closely guarded secret. Dreaming of a better life, she struggles to bring up her young son as best she can.
A precarious balance in the town is upset when a ragged-looking man appears from the forest. Samarin claims to be a revolutionary who has escaped from an Arctic prison. Anna takes a shine to the new arrival but when a local shaman is found dead, suspicion and terror engulf the little town.
Samarin faces trial. As his incredible story emerges we hear of the terrible Winter Garden, where he was held, and another prisoner, The Mohican, a cannibal who helped him escape the jail in order that he might eat Samarin as food for his journey. The cannibal is a day behind, he warns, and the town must prepare itself for his arrival.The quartet at the centre of the story consists of Anna, a photographer and romantic; her ex-husband, Balashov, an ex-Cossack horseman who has become a castrate and the leader of the local cult; and Anna's two lovers, one a decent Czech soldier, Mutz; and the other Samarin, who beneath his irresistible charisma will stop at nothing to see his political ideals realised. The story thunders forward as revelations about the lives and loves of the central characters are revealed. Most nail-biting of all is the discovery, after Anna has invited Samarin to take refuge in her house, that Samarin is the boy student from the start of the book and that he and The Mohican are one and the same person. Anna flirts with the cannibal in her house, unaware. Then Yazyk falls under attack from the Red army stationed just kilometres away along the Trans-Siberian railway.
In an explosive climax, Samarin takes Anna's son hostage and hijacks a train in order to flee the town. The boy gets hurt and at the last minute he cannot bring himself to put the life of this boy before his own ideals. Meanwhile Anna's emasculated ex-husband renounces his submissive vows and in an act certain to lead to his own death, slices off the head of the bullying Czech commander.
The book ends with the Red army taking over the town, the Czechs returning home and Anna, now safely reunited with her son, deciding to pursue a new life in the bold new Russia. Samarin has escaped into the distance.
This story is an epic drama of desire and sacrifice, full of hot blood and magnetic characters, played out against one of the most remote landscapes on earth.

James Meek is an award winning journalist and the author of 'The People's Act of Love' (Canongate), 2005. James Meek was born in London in 1962and grew up in Dundee. He has published two novels, 'McFarlane Boils The Sea' and 'Drivetime', and two collections of short stories, 'Last Orders' and, most recently, 'The Museuem of Doubt'. He contributed to the acclaimed Rebel Inc anthologies 'The Children of Albion Rovers' and 'The Rovers Return'.

He has worked as a newspaper reporter since 1985. He lived in the former Soviet Union from 1991 to 1999. He now lives in London, where he writes for the Guardian, and contributes to the 'London Review of Books' and 'Granta'. In 2004 his reporting from Iraq and about Guantanamo Bay won a number of British and international awards.