If Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by left you craving unflinching post-Soviet chaos, then reach for Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by .
Curated by NextBookAfter Editors. This read-alike match weighs tone, themes, pacing, character dynamics, and emotional payoff rather than genre alone. See how recommendations are chosen.
Buy on AmazonWhy It's Your Next Read
- Surreal testimonies w/o authorial filter—pure chaos
- Putin-era absurdity meets emotional wreckage head-on
- Gangsters to oligarchs: polyphonic truth-telling
- Media manipulation dissected through lived despair
Alexievich gave you the Soviet collapse through unmediated voices—Pomerantsev hands you Putin's Russia as a fever dream where truth dissolves entirely. Here, oligarchs reinvent themselves weekly, reality TV directors script political protests, and gangsters philosophize about postmodern identity while the wreckage piles higher. It's the same polyphonic chaos you craved, now refracted through a hall of mirrors where manipulation becomes the only constant.
No authorial safety net softens the blow. Pomerantsev lets his subjects' delusions and cruelties speak for themselves, building a mosaic of absurdity that honors the messiness you demand from post-Soviet testimony.
If you want the emotional toll of history without sanitized narratives, this is your reckoning.
What Readers Are Saying
"Nothing is True and Everything is Possible depicts a country unmoored, with no rule of law, no economic policy, and no real political opposition. All this has become normalised and accepted, through skillful Kremlin manipulation." — Anna, Goodreads
"This isn't a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends... Russia is not like, not striving to be like and never going to be anything like, the West." — Tanja Berg, Goodreads
"Alice hurtling down a glittering rabbit-hole. The fascination with Russia... strikes me as similar to being hypnotised by the mingled beauty and danger of a large predator." — Antonomasia, Goodreads
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