Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan

Money is flooding into Kazakhstan. The country is home to vast gas and oil deposits, and its staggering level of international investment is increasing year by year. And yet, Kazakhstan effectively looks and feels like a Cold War state. Its president for the last 26 years, Nazarbayev, is a ruthless dictator who believes in telepathy (visitors to national monuments can place their hands on a golden handprint and send him telepathic messages) and recently constructed a 56-metre glass pyramid in which 100 Kazakhstani religious leaders will meet to discuss the future of the world.

This book teases out the strange and fascinating conditions of present-day Kazakhstan - a state haunted by disappearances, buried Uranium mines, corruption, and gangsterdom at the highest levels of power. Joanna Lillis is a compelling storyteller and a shrewd social critic; her study evokes a country simultaneously lost in its complex past and poised to move into the foreground of world affairs.