The revelatory, much-anticipated memoir from the Wall Street Journal reporter who was wrongly imprisoned in Putin’s Russia for more than a year—a glimpse inside the perils and contradictions of a country in the midst of autocracy.

‍“Propulsive and astutely observed, This Cursed Beautiful Land is much more than a captivity memoir by a young man who found himself at the center of a geopolitical storm. It is a rousing tribute to the beauty and importance of old-fashioned journalism, a taut thriller of high stakes ‘hostage diplomacy,’ and a poignant meditation on the human struggle between hope and apathy under authoritarian rule.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times-bestselling author of London Falling

“Sometimes funny, frequently harrowing, always illuminating, This Cursed Beautiful Land is more than the story of a news reporter who became the news. Gershkovich lives in two worlds at once—American and Russian, observer and protagonist, subject and object—while an autocratic regime tries to reduce him to a trading chip. This book is a testament to the humanity he refused to surrender, and a prison memoir that doubles as a love letter, not to the dictatorship that imprisoned him, but to the Russia underneath: its language, landscape, literature, and people.”—Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See

“A rich and suspenseful saga of Russia’s rapid descent into autocracy, told in intimate, often chilling detail by an American reporter who saw it from the inside—as a prisoner falsely arrested for espionage by Putin’s FSB. I could be wrong, but I think I hear Solzhenitsyn applauding in his grave.”—Erik Larson, New York Times-bestselling author of The Demon of Unrest

“In this memoir that reads like a thriller, Evan Gershkovich brings all his reportorial skills to bear as he chronicles his journey through a Kafka-esque justice system. As a pawn in the new Great Game of prisoner swapping, the journalist became the news. Now Evan tells the private story behind his public ordeal, in vivid detail and with a profound understanding of Russian history and prison’s effect on individual lives.”—Radhika Jones, writer and former editor, Vanity Fair