Depending on whether the accent falls on the first or the second syllable, ‘conjuring’ means ‘doing clever tricks’ or ‘appealing solemnly to’, and in reading this strange book I could never quite make up my mind in which sense the author was using it. Galina Lindquist, Russian-born, but resident in Sweden, portrays a gallery of Muscovites active on the outer fringes of healing. Some resort to all manner of tricks and subterfuges; others, more serious, appeal solemnly to the Orthodox faith to help them effect their cures. Russia, more than anywhere else in the world, provides fertile soil for the operation of mountebanks. Did not Leonid Brezhnev employ Dzhuna, a Georgian healer, to keep him and his Kremlin colleagues alive (p. 34)? Lindquist took a degree in anthropology at the University of Stockholm, specialising in the study of urban shamans in Scandinavia, but then found her real metier doing field research in Moscow, where, of course, being Russian guaranteed her entry into circles inaccessible to westerners, opening up people's confidences to an astonishing degree. The result is a book which reveals an unknown aspect of Russian subculture, stunning in its complexity, duplicity and – occasionally – its resort to something akin to genuine religion. During perestroika the flood-gates opened. For a time, Anatoli Kashpirovski dominated the television screens just as surely as the TV evangelists in America – and, like some of them, ended up by being exposed. You were supposed to put in front of the screen a bowl of water which would become charged with his energy during transmissions, and thus it acquired healing properties. Another practitioner reads a genuine Orthodox prayer in Church Slavonic, cracks an egg and the patient's ‘negative energies’ are siphoned off into the mixture (p. 76), the egg being a symbol of purity and new life in the Russia tradition. Conjuring hope contains hundreds of such examples, all based on research during the last twenty years. Every remedy costs money, of course, and there is not the slightest attempt to regulate the industry, as is the purpose of the new Natural Healthcare Council in the UK. The book raises many uncomfortable questions. In this phantasmagoria, is there embedded any genuine healing, any genuine religion? (The answer has to be a guarded yes). Is the author occasionally drawn in too closely with the lot of some of the characters she interviews? Again, the answer is a guarded yes. Lindquist knew a certain ‘Katerina’ (pseudonym) over a period of years. She was a devout believer and the portrait which emerges, her working environment, her personality, her faith, is a sympathetic one. Yet one of her star patients, after a long relationship, denounces her as a ‘fake and your treatment is a failure!’ (p. 112). The lady never returned to the consulting room. Lindquist herself admits in the preface that she sometimes sent other Russian friends to Katerina for treatment, which seems to cross the boundaries of objective research. This disturbing book leads us into a labyrinth from which we never emerge.