The Surelikud are a minority people living near or in the Siberian Forest, and against the backdrop of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, it is their culture Rahväema Ranavutavskaya becomes involved in the struggle to maintain. Her career takes her to the leadership of the movement twice and is full of reversals and distractions – including two unhappy marriages – that alienate her not only from her family but from the very people for whom she is battling. She is imperious, but her imperiousness is measured and modest. She is resilient, and on the point of near-complete defeat she has been able to achieve enormous success, though at no small cost to her and her cause.

Now Rahväema is dictating her novel to “the scribe”: a younger campaigner who is both friend and bitter rival, keen to replace her as leader. This methodology creates a degree of spontaneity and a generational dialogue between her and the scribe. For Rahväema is writing with a purpose, not purely for her own posterity but mainly for a new understanding she has developed in old age – one that is as universalist as her former campaigns were focused solely on the Surelikud. But she is not a reliable narrator, as she herself sometimes appears to suggest, and her story leaves many questions. Who are this Halvatud and Kurat that she alludes to throughout her story, if they exist? Is she playing with civilisation’s concept of good and evil, saying that only when we are surrounded by evil must we have recourse to the idea of goodness? Is she too jaded by nearly a century of suffering to see clearly?

This is a novel of politics, but much more than that it is a novel about political activism: of what it means to save one's culture in a rapidly changing world, and how in trying to save one corner of the world, it is all too easy to lose oneself.

“Allan Cameron brilliantly captures the bizarre kaleidoscope of Eurasia's cultural and linguistic complexity and contradictions, its human heavens and political hells, and his invention of the Surelikud people is an ingenious way into these matters. A Woman's War Against Progress … is a unique novel: sweeping, intellectually rich, powerful and inventive.” –Damien Le Bas, author

“[A Woman's War Against Progress] is a majestic, always original work. … Giving the novel the voice of a ‘First People’ opens a quite new way of feeling one’s way into that Soviet period. Well written, of course, and always striking in [its] social/political criticism. … A Russian river of a novel.” – Neal Ascherson

“… the readership [of] A Woman’s War against Progress… will find their minds stretched, challenged and enlarged by the experience. It’s a remarkable achievement”– James Robertson, Scottish Review

“As Pushkin’sTales of Belkin contained, among other things, a scathing critique of ills in his own nineteenth- century Russian society, Cameron notes that in his novel ‘… I am trying to demonstrate how completely dysfunctional and mendacious our own societies are’. … This is a novel of great profundity and perhaps Neil Ascherson’s description of it as a ‘river of a novel’ is most apt.” –Dr Margaret Tejerizo, in the Bottle Imp