Featured titles
-
Zwinger, a novel by Elena Kostioukovitch (2013)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Italy - BOMPIANI (RCS LIBRI), Russia - CORPUS BOOKS (AST), Serbia - RUSSICA, Ukraine - FOLIO
Elena Kostioukovitch´s Zwinger blends together the genres of historical novel and thriller, with a lively and ironic style. In the frame of a fictional detective story, the book investigates deeply into the real mysteries of the Twentieth century history through precious documents and direct testimonies of the author.
«Just before Victor Zieman was faxed the severed head of his assistant Mireille, he was sitting in the Iroha restaurant in Frankfurt with Behr, eating tempura. It was Wednesday. All this mayhem had started on the Saturday before the Book Fair, in Victor’s Milan apartment where everything looked exactly the same as it always did.»
Seven wild days in the life of Zwinger's main character, Victor Sieman, twist together into a tight knot of quest and adventure, where the final, true goal turns out to be finding oneself. The road home and the road to oneself are a classic plot, and the Odysseus-Ulysses of 2005 is a contemporary European intellectual weighted down by knowledge, history, and the baggage of our entire centuries-old culture.
Victor Sieman works for a book publisher, specializing in books on historical archives. As he is preparing to leave for the 2005 Frankfurt Book Fair, he gets a strange phone call. Someone is offering to sell him family documents related to his grandfather's wartime past. His grandfather (modelled on the author's grandfather, Leonid Volynsky) was in Dresden in the first seven days of May 1945, leading the search for paintings from the Dresden Art Museum hidden by the Nazis – and almost paid for it with his freedom and his life.
Now Victor has only seven days to recover his family's papers and uncover details from his family's past – his mother's death, his mysterious father – while keeping up with his important assignment, and searching for the French girl Mireille, who has possibly gotten entangled in a web of secrets, intrigues, threats and cruelty. And what if Mireille is just a tool of her devious puppetmasters?
Rare documents, discoveries and revelations await our hero at every turn – a roller coaster ride through a spy novel together with a criminal thriller, wartime drama, professional journalism (with an insider's knowledge of the book business), and autobiography. The wartime events are meticulously researched and based on the author's family history, and the Moscow Olympics were experienced by the author directly. There is no hearsay in this book: everything is based either in personal memory, or in the hard memory of documents.
In the vortex of Victor's adventures, we find Ukrainian laborers in today's Europe, KGB agents from Brezhnev's time, journalists from «Voice of...» radio stations before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Russian mafia thugs busy colonizing the world.
Technical details: 1.256 000 characters, 222 000 words
Read more... -
Hanuman’s Travels, a novel by Andrei Ivanov (2009)
Rights sold: Estonia - VARRAK, France - Le Tripode, Germany - Kunstmann, World English - Vagabond Voices
Winner of the 2009 Yuri Dolgoruky Foundation Prize
Shortlisted for the 2010 Russian Booker Prize
Hanuman’s Travels, which was shortlisted for the Russian Booker in 2010, translated into English, German and French, and put on the German stage, is the picaresque tale of two asylum seekers, one a Russian Estonian man (the narrator) and the other an Indian (the protagonist), and their daily lives in a Danish refugee camp and on the road in the late 1990s. While they are waiting to go to the Danish island of Lolland, which is said to be a paradise, the two companions in misfortune survive in any way they can.
Among scams, big and small disgraces, humiliations and lies, a map is gradually drawn – a detailed map of itineraries where the hopes and the fears of thousands of marginal people flounder and intertwine. Their struggle at times engenders dismissiveness and even intolerance, but also humanity, courage and the wisdom born of experience and resignation. Andrei Ivanov was inspired to write this novel by his own vicissitudes as a stateless person living in Denmark.
The title clearly refers to Ramayana, an epic tale of a prince forced into exile and his years-long journey with his faithful companion, the monkey king. In Hindu mythology, Rāma is an “ideal person”, an avatar of the god Vishnu, who has adopted the shape of a mortal in order to demonstrate dharma, the right and virtuous life. The same question is faced daily by the heroes of all Ivanov’s books: how to remain human in the world out of joint, which is anything but humane – a world that denies his humanity.
Read more...