by Sergei Lebedev translated by Antonina W. Bouis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017
This gorgeously written, unsettling novel—a rare work about the fall of the Soviet Union as told through the eyes of a...
Lebedev follows up Oblivion (2016), his powerful novel about the atrocities of the gulag, with this autobiographical tale of a boy's coming-of-age during the years leading to the fall of the Soviet Union.
A "child of an earthquake" who was shaken from his mother's womb in Moscow by tectonic waves emanating from Bucharest, our unnamed protagonist spends much of the novel trying to shake the unsettled state into which he was born. The unspoken past, his country's and his family's, is no mere backdrop for his adventures. The ghostly mysteries of the Stalin era and its aftermath impinge on his every thought and feeling, intensified by his discovery of simple objects that provide clues to his family's participation in those events. The boy is largely raised by his war-widowed grandmothers, one of peasant stock, the other from a noble line, both tied in different ways to the Communist Party. As the system unravels, chaos increasingly infects people's lives, as does a "tyranny of necessities" emblematized by the ready availability of shoes but not spare shoelaces. The Chernobyl disaster deepens our hero's free-floating fear and intensifies his desire to create his own alternative reality. He pursues a friendship with an enigmatic adult named Ivan and risks contact with a child killer called Mister who is on the loose outside his family's dacha. While the latter half of the book has a certain romantic streak in introducing the hero to personal freedom, or at least the possibility of letting down his guard, the obsessive early sections boast such a relentless, close-in intensity the effect can be claustrophobic. But it's a good kind of claustrophobia: you read and reread Lebedev's lyrical, cutting prose with equal amounts of awe and enjoyment.
This gorgeously written, unsettling novel—a rare work about the fall of the Soviet Union as told through the eyes of a child—leaves us with a fresh understanding of that towering moment in recent history.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-939931-4-12
Page Count: 275
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Share your opinion of this book
More by Sergei Lebedev
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Sergei Lebedev ; translated by Antonina W. Bouis
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
19
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.