Fringing the Black Sea are a kaleidoscope of countries, some centuries old and others emerging only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through the stories of the people he meets there, Jens Muhling seeks to paint a picture of this cauldron of cultures and to understand the present against a backdrop of change stretching back to the arrival of Ancient Greek settlers and beyond. A fluent Russian speaker with a knack for gaining the trust of those he meets, Muhling's cast of characters, as diverse as the stories he hears, is ready to tell him their complex, contradictory, often fantastical tales, full of grief and legend. He meets descendants of the so-called Pontic Greeks, whom Stalin deported to Central Asia and who have now returned; Circassians, known from Tolstoy's Caucasus stories, who fled to Syria a century ago and whose great-great-grandchildren, now displaced, have returned to Abkhazia; and members of ethnic minorities: the Georgian Mingrelians, Turkish Lazis, or Bulgarian Muslims expelled to Turkey in the summer of 1989. Not to mention the molluscs and other species that have unsettled the delicate ecological balance of this unique body of water. Nowhere does the uneasy alliance of tradition and modernity seem starker, and there is no better writer to capture the diverse humanity of those who live there.

'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.

Ten years ago journalist Jens Muhling met Juri, a Russian television producer whose job it was to sell stories to TV stations in Germany but who always maintained that 'The true stories are more unbelievable than anything I could invent.' Ever since, Jens Muhling has been travelling through Russia in search of stories that appear too unbelievable to be true: a hermit from the Taiga who only recently found out that there was a world beyond the woods, a priest who ventures into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to preach to those that stubbornly remain there, and many more. Jens Muhling shows us a country whose customs, contradictions, absurdities and attractions are still largely unknown beyond its borders.