Featured titles
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Churov and Churbanov, a novel by Ksenia Buksha
Rights sold: Russia - AST
Shortlisted for the 2020 Big Book Award
Churov and Churbanov is a classic Petersburg tale in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Gogol, and the city’s atmosphere is palpable in every scene. The book is also a family drama; a riff on the Gothic theme of the double; a laugh-out-loud adventure novel; a sly triumph of speculative fiction; an elegy on growing up (and old); and a portrait of two familiar types: the awkward, hard-working nice guy (Churov, a pediatric cardiologist) and the life-of-the-party woman magnet (Churbanov, a two-bit wheeler-dealer). Their dissimilar lives begin to entwine after they discover their hearts beat in unison. This seemingly pointless synchrony has a side effect: a pair like them can sync other people’s heartbeats to their own, thus saving the lives of patients with serious heart conditions. But there’s a downside: when one of the original pair dies, all those whose heartbeats the pair synchronized die, too. Churov and Churbanov must follow their hearts, so to speak, in deciding what role their arbitrary gift will play for those around them. Buksha proves we depend on each other more than we realize, and we can save (or destroy) lives even if our hearts don’t beat as one.
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Please check Anne O. Fisher's page for a sample translation and media reviews dedicated to Churov and Churbanov in English: https://www.anneofisher.com/ksenia-buksha
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The Night We Disappeared, a novel by Nikolai Kononov
Rights sold: Russia - INDIVIDUUM
This is a polyphonic novel ambitious both in terms of its literary quality and the issues it discusses: xenophobia, inequality, post-memory, the "right turn," and anarchy. It is, of course, also a book about a search for identity, both among individuals and within the territories of Eastern Europe, where inhabitants suffered over and over during social upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. The novel is centered on a phenomenon of apatrides - people rejected by their homeland who - against their will - became citizens of the world.
The plot-lines of the three main characters in Kononov’s novel are all set between 1919 and 1951. All three are refugees from the Russian and Soviet empires: they are exiles, stateless persons. Even so, history gave each a chance to play their own role in history before, during, and after World War II. Their trauma and pain affect their descendants – our contemporaries – in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
A young woman – a teacher who was raised by a dedicated Marxist mother in the USSR in the 1930s – suddenly converts to Christianity while surviving the Nazi occupation in the city of Pskov during WWII. She later witnesses a lesbian relationship developing between two young schoolgirls in a refugee camp. A White Russian émigré pretends to be a Bolshevik spy, deceives the German military-intelligence service, then falls in love with an anarchist woman and tries to turn the theory of love’s powerlessness into reality. A German refugee suffers from a dissociative identity disorder because he is unable to cope with the fact that he had betrayed his parents while saving his own life.
The circumstances of the lives of these three characters are told in letters, diaries, and documents discovered by our contemporaries: one of them is a high school girl who openly expresses an outrage against the war in Ukraine, another is a student working on her dissertation on the history of anarchism in a London apartment, the third is a German who was recently released from prison after serving a sentence for committing murder in the heat of passion.
The Night We Disappeared is about an individual’s bewilderment when facing a changing world and its uncontrollable brute forces. It’s about the utter fiasco of existing social structures, and the urgent need for new forms and ways of social interaction.
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