The Long Hangover is considered and careful and humane, and should be compulsory reading for any politician considering engagement with either Moscow or Ukraine. Its not only the best book I've read on Putin's Russia, but also has great resonance for the age of Donald Trump and Brexit: no one likes being told they're a loser, everyone needs something to believe in. (Oliver Bullough, The Observer)

[Walker] does an excellent job and ... keeps his narrative relatively short in a gripping and clear-sighted way. (Eamon Delaney, Irish Independent)

[Walker] is more successful than most of his western journalistic competitors in exploring the often contradictory attitudes that Russians hold towards their president and the hybrid system he is building on the basis of Russian nationalism, Soviet nostalgia and a striving for international respect. (Jonathan Steele, The Guardian)

It is hard to find fault in such a spectacular book, which deftly weaves personal narratives with grand geopolitical tensions to produce a compelling read ... a real tour de force of book-length reporting. (Kieran Pender, Australian Book Review)

It is ... [the] passages - so charged with personality whilst remaining politically astute that make Walkers prose so compelling to read. He takes the singular melody we trumpet about Russia in the West and adds harmony, dynamics, colour and context. Read this book and you will have a more nuanced understanding of the dissonant symphonies emanating from the east. (Matthew Janney, Culture Trip)

a superb book (Angus Roxburgh, CABLE Magazine)

The Long Hangover thankfully does not fixate on the character of Putin. Instead, it focuses on the social conditions that he taps into (and manipulates). The book is girded by Walker's vivid reporting from every corner of the country - far more valuable than armchair analyzing. It also refrains from offering any easy or sweeping answers. (William Armstrong, Hurriyet Daily News)

The Long Hangover is thoughtful, brave, and full of insight. Anyone who wants to understand Russia now needs to read it. (John Simpson, BBC News)

The heroes of our age of postmodern myth are the investigative reporters. Shaun Walker has not only done the hard and necessary work of reporting from Russia and Ukraine, he has also reflected, with remarkable historical and literary sensibility, on what it means when a great power gives up on its own future and decides instead to market its past. (Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University, and author of On Tyranny and Bloodlands)

In this skillful and vivid book, Shaun Walker allows us to understand the region's current affairs through ordinary and extraordinary people's experience of an un-dealt with past. (Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible)

Shaun Walker is the Moscow correspondent for The Guardian. He studied Russian and Soviet history at Oxford University, and has worked as a journalist in Moscow for more than a decade. Previously, he was Moscow Correspondent for the Independent.