Books like WHISPERERS by Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes traces the 1917 Russian Revolution as a sweeping tragedy that swept a nation and its people— peasants, workers, soldiers, and intellectuals—into chaos and dictatorship.

Chris Ware’s Graphic Novel "Building Stories" offers a quiet, intricate look at urban life, weaving social customs, apartment living, and city life into a touching visual narrative.

Detective Carella and his team investigate a murder in the 87th Precinct and uncover a mysterious musical that could lead to a killer who stays until the last dance.

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russian history. Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivization and the first Five-Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. It was a world of privation, overcrowding, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollow. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned everyday life into a nightmare, and of the ways that ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it, primarily by patronage and the ubiquitous system of personal connections known as blat. And we read of the police surveillance that was ubiquitous to this society, and the waves of terror, like the Great Purges of 1937, that periodically cast this world into turmoil. Fitzpatrick illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, traveling, telling jokes, finding an apartment, getting an education, landing a job, cultivating patrons and connections, marrying and raising a family, writing complaints and denunciations, voting, and trying to steer clear of the secret police.