The Moscow Metro is one of the busiest underground railway networks in the world. Every year over 2.5 billion passengers travel its 300 kilometres of track linking 177 stations. It is also an extraordinary museum, a people's palace and a dazzling art gallery, celebrated in poetry and popular song, film and fiction, by writers from Mayakovsky and Brecht to Lukyanenko.
Three Men on the Metro is a journey from the Newcastle Metro to the Moscow Metro. Armed only with a battered copy of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men on a Boat (a cult classic in the Soviet Union) poets Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers are soon lost underground. Like their predecessors on the Thames, they are completely out of their depth, idealists abroad, adrift in a very foreign medium.
Three Men on the Metro is a voyage around (and around and around) the heart of a culture poised between retrenchment and convulsive change. It's a book about poetry, politics, propaganda and railway platforms. To say nothing of the dogs.
