Troubled Water

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCHLEGEL-TIECK PRIZE 2023

‘A brisk and brilliant tour.’
The Telegraph

‘[Mühling] is an enjoyable and insightful companion’
Times Literary Supplement

‘Troubled Water is not, in a conventional sense, a history book… but the book is an excellent introduction to a complex, heavily layered, bitterly contested and often rewritten past.’
Wall Street Journal

‘Mühling makes for an observant and often wry travelling companion, conversant in several of the region’s languages’
The Washington Post

‘Fresh, engaging and keenly observed.’
Literary Review

REVIEWS

Dramatic conflicts, migrating populations, changing fortunes. Decades of political and cultural pressure under communism. The encroachment of climate change and globalisation. For centuries, the Black Sea has been at the centre of a shifting kaleidoscope of stories.

Visiting every country around the coast, Jens Mühling explores nations both ancient and nascent, connecting with local people and landscapes, following their stories, and discovering the startling sights of this multifaceted region. He portrays minority populations who vie proudly for respect and autonomy, and depicts a region of never-ending social and ecological transformation ― from gradual evolutions to the stark shockwaves of displacements and invasions. Ultimately, Mühling shows the peoples and places of this region are much like the sea around which they converge: restless, enigmatic, underestimated, and captivating.

JENS MÜHLING has worked as a foreign reporter for German newspapers and magazines for two decades. His features and essays on Eastern Europe have won him several awards, and his travelogue A Journey into Russia was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award in 2015.

Read Jens’s interview with The Washington Post here.