Stalin's Nose

Through war and revolution, decay and regeneration, Stalin's Nose is a surreal and darkly comic ride and a portrait of Europe like no other. Rory MacLean's ground-breaking debut travel book begins when Winston the pig drops onto Uncle Peter's head and kills him dead. Unwilling to be left alone in her house Aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and a vivacious eccentric, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out on one last ride. The Berlin Wall has fallen only weeks before and Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and rediscover her remarkable east European family. Zita's relations - the angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who buried Stalin's nose, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose ends of her life. They picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin's embalmer. They carry a long-lost corpse over the Carpathian mountains. In a rattling Trabant the unlikely trio puff and wheeze across the changing continent, following the threads of memory.