Red Plenty

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

Red Plenty is history, it’s fiction, it’s as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

“After making splash in England, Spufford’s newest novel is likely to do the same in the U.S. If you think that a novel about the planned economy of the USSR from the 1950s through the 1970s would be boring, think again. . . . By teetering delicately between history and fiction, the novel leaves readers with a sense of the period that could not have been achieved with a straight, factual approach.” —Booklist

“Though the intricacies of Soviet central planning may seem an unlikely topic for a work of historical fiction, Spufford succeeds at distilling the dismal science into a page-turner and using the unconventional vehicles of linear planning, cybernetics, communal agricultural policy, and exposition on the respective merits of Marx and Hayek (buttressed by extensive footnotes) to explore the entire range of human emotion. . . . Extensively researched and both convincing and compelling in its idiosyncrasies . . . this genre-bending book surprised in many ways."—Publishers Weekly

“Spufford, who has succeeded in turning possibly the least promising fictional material of all time into an incredibly smart, surprisingly involving and deeply eccentric book, a hammer-and-sickle version of Altman’s Nashville, with central committees replacing country music. . . . I am not alone in thinking that he has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature.”—Nick Hornby, The Believer

“Like no other history book I have ever read . . . Spufford’s book is almost impossible to categorise. . . . In many ways it reads like a collection of stories, and yet it is hard to believe that there could be a better and more rigorous evocation of that brief, illusory moment when Soviet communism seemed poised to transform the world . . . [I] finished it in awe, not merely at Spufford’s Stakhanovite research, but at his skill as a novelist, his judgement as a historian and his sheer guts in attempting something simultaneously so weird and yet so wonderful.”—Sunday Times