A Book of the Year for The Times and the Sunday Times `The writer is the engineer of the human soul,' claimed Stalin. Although one wonders how many found nourishment in Turkmenbashi's Book of the Soul (once required reading for driving tests in Turkmenistan), not to mention Stalin's own poetry. Certainly, to be considered great, a dictator must write, and write a lot. Mao had his Little Red Book, Mussolini and Saddam Hussein their romance novels, Kim Jong-il his treatise on the art of film, Hitler his hate-filled tracts. What do these texts reveal about their authors, the worst people imaginable? And how did they shape twentieth-century history? To find out, Daniel Kalder read them all - the badly written and the astonishingly badly written - so that you don't have to. This is the untold history of books so terrible they should have been crimes.

When Daniel Kalder, acclaimed author of Lost Cosmonaut, descended into the sewers of Moscow in pursuit of the mythical lost city of tramps, he didn't realise that he was embarking on a bizarre, year-long odyssey that would lead him thousands of miles across Russia to the Arctic Circle. After exploring the depths of Moscow's 'Underground Planet', Kalder chases down demons and exorcists in a post-Orange Revolution Ukraine, meets Vissaron Christ, messiah to thousands of followers in Siberia, enters the world's only wooden skyscraper and encounters a man with a bizarre secret that may explain everything . . .

'As the world has become smaller so its wonders have diminished. There is nothing amazing about the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids of Egypt. They are as banal and familiar as the face of a Cornflakes packet. The true unknown frontiers lie elsewhere. The duty of the traveller, of the voyager, is to open up new zones of experience. In our over explored world these must of necessity be wastelands, black holes, and grim urban blackspots: all the places which, ordinarily, people choose to avoid. THE ONLY TRUE VOYAGERS, THEREFORE, ARE ANTI-TOURISTS.' Lost Cosmonaut documents Daniel Kalder's travels in the bizarre and mysterious worlds of Russia's ethnic republics. Obsessed with a quest he never fully understands, Kalder boldly goes where no man has gone before: in the deserts of Kalmykia, he stumbles upon a city dedicated to chess and a forgotten tribe of Mongols; in Mari El, home to Europe's last pagan nation, he meets the Chief Druid and participates in an ancient rite; while in the bleak industrial badlands of Udmurtia, Kalder looks for Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK47, and accidentally becomes a TV star. Profane yet wise, utterly honest and yet full of lies, Lost Cosmonaut is an eye-opening, blackly comic tour of the most alien plant in our cosmos: Earth.

Daniel Kalder belongs to a unique group: the anti-tourists. Sworn to uphold the mysterious tenets of "The Shymkent Declarations," the anti-tourist seeks out the dark, lost zones of our planet, eschewing comfort, embracing hunger and hallucinations, and always traveling at the wrong time of year. In "Lost Cosmonaut," Kalder visits locations that most of us don't even know exist -- Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El, and Udmurtia. He loves these places because no one else does, because everyone else passes them by.

A tale of adventure, conversation, boredom, and observation -- occasionally enhanced by an overactive imagination -- Kalder reveals a world of hidden cities, lost rites, mail-order brides, machine guns, mutants, and cold, cold emptiness. In the desert wastelands of Kalmykia, he stumbles upon New Vasyuki, the only city in the world dedicated to chess. In Mari El, home to Europe's last pagan nation, he meets the chief Druid and participates in an ancient rite; while in the bleak industrial badlands of Udmurtia, Kalder searches for Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, and inadvertently becomes a TV star. An unorthodox mix of extraordinary stories woven together with fascinating history, peculiar places, and even stranger people, "Lost Cosmonaut" is poetic and profane, hilarious and yet oddly heartwarming, bizarre and even educational. In short, it's the perfect guide to the most alien planet in our cosmos: Earth.