High Caucasus

A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland

By: Tom Parfitt

Narrated by: Tom Parfitt

Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

A wonderfully atmospheric memoir-cum-travel narrative about how British journalist Tom Parfitt walked a thousand miles across Russia's Caucasus mountains to lay to rest a ghost after witnessing the carnage of the Beslan school siege in 2004.

On 1 September 2004, Chechen and Ingush militants took more than a thousand people captive at a school in the Caucasus region of southern Russia. Working as a correspondent, Tom Parfitt witnessed the bloody climax in which 314 hostages died, more than half of them children. The experience left Tom emotionally shredded, struggling to find a way to return to his life in Moscow and put to rest the ghosts of the Beslan siege.

Having long been fascinated by the mountainous North Caucasus, Tom turned to his love of walking as a source of both recuperation and discovery. In High Caucasus, he shares his remarkable thousand-mile quest in search of personal peace - and a greater understanding of the roots of violence in a region whose fate has tragic parallels with the Ukraine of today.

Starting his journey in Sochi on the Black Sea and walking the mountain ranges to Derbent, the ancient fortress city on the Caspian, Tom traverses the political, religious and ethnic fault-lines of seven Russian republics, including Chechnya and Dagestan. Through bear-haunted forests, across high altitude pastures and over the shoulders of Elbrus, Europe's highest mountain, he finds companionship and respite in the homes of proud, little-known peoples. Walking exerts a restorative power; it also provides a unique, ground-level view of a troubled yet exquisite corner of the world.

High Caucasus is a stunning memoir of confronting trauma through connection with history, people and place.

©2023 Tom Parfitt (P)2023 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Critic reviews

'A thrilling and beautiful book. Tom Parfitt's extreme walk along Europe's wildest frontier - through the mosaic of restive statelets on the southern edge of Russia - is epic in itself, but it offers too a drill-down into the deepest layers of human experience - collective memory and individual survival, the legacy of horror and the joy of healing.' (Philip Marsden, author of The Summer Isles, The Spirit Wrestlers and The Crossing Place)

'Superb. Tom Parfitt is one of our great travel writers: curious, indomitable and brave. His account of his journey on foot across the North Caucasus is a masterpiece of observation and lyrical prose.' (Luke Harding, author of Invasion)

'Evocative, intimate and insightful, this is an extraordinary look at life as a foreign correspondent as told from the messy inside. Tom Parfitt is brilliant at zooming in and out of the bigger picture, revealing the sweep of history as it's being written whilst also capturing every detail and feeling up close and personal. This beautifully written account of his relationship with the Caucasus in the aftermath of Beslan offers essential context for anyone trying to understand what is happening in Ukraine and Russia and what might happen next. Most of all, High Caucasus is a reminder of how deeply these not-so-far-away conflicts affect us all.' (Viv Groskop, author of The Anna Karenina Fix)