In the late summer of 1992, a thirty-three-year-old Northern Irish yachtsman, Miles Clark, arrived in triumph in Istanbul, having completed an epic circumnavigation of Europe via the North Atlantic, the White Sea and the waterways of post-Soviet Russia. Newly married, charismatic and handsome, and already a much-praised writer and explorer, Miles seed to have the world at his feet. Less than a year later, however, he committed suicide in mysterious circumstances, leaving his family prostrate with grief and bewilderment.brbrInToo Foreign a Place, Miles’s older sibling, the journalist Bruce Clark – a specialist in Russian politics and culture – searches in his family’s past for clues to what might lie behind an unthinkable tragedy. He traces the brothers’ gilded upbringing in a wealthy and prominent Northern Irish Unionist family; examines the questing spirit they inherited from their father Wallace Clark, an energetic sailor and maritime historian; and considers the contrasting impulses that led these two very different brothers to seek fulfilment and adventure in a fracturing and volatile Russia, far from the Protestant Ulster that bred th.brbrAs he anatomises a tragic family saga and comes to terms with his own personal grief, Bruce Clark reflects on the two political collapses that frame his absorbing and moving narrative: the chaotic downfall of Soviet communism and the slower disintegration of the old Unionist order in Northern Ireland, of which the Clark family was a bastion.p