ELKOST International literary agency - National Prize in China 2006

Featured titles

Auntie Mina (Tetia Motia), a novel by Maya Kucherskaya (2012)

Rights sold: Italy - ODOYA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG,Turkey - Miralay Yayinlari, Russia - AST

Shortlisted for the 2013 Yasnaya Polyana Award
Shortlisted for the 2013 Big Book Award

Great, complex, beautiful novel. - TimeOut Moscow

Marina, or Auntie Mina as her father used to call her when she was a child, is a 30-years-old woman, a daughter of university professor and a philologist by education herself, works as a proofreader in the newspaper. She's married for eight years, and has a 5-year-old son Artyom, though she's very unhappy with her family life.

At one point, Marina falls in love with her co-worker Lanin, a famous columnist and TV host. He is some twenty years her older, but their affair is growing fast, and they love each other passionately. The only obstacle is that Lanin is married, and his wife is slowly dying of cancer, so he can't divorce her.

INTO THE THICKENING FOG, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov

Rights sold: France - ACTES SUD, Russia - EKSMO, World English - AMAZON CROSSING,

Sometimes a novel describes reality so well it creates a physical sensation. Into the Thickening Fog could make even readers in the tropics pull up a blanket.

A famous director returns to his hometown, a tiny city in Russia’s Far North, where he foolishly shows up without even a scarf. But Filippov can’t head straight to his friend’s apartment to share the bad news he’s traveled so far to deliver. The city’s centralized heating system has broken down, chaos ensues, and Filippov finds himself walking through the frigid weather. He struggles to see and even to stand up straight as he stumbles forward, detoured at every turn by obstacles both real and imagined. Luckily, he has a flask of Hennessy and a sense of humor.

At once hilarious and stark, this novel is a great entry point for reading one of Russia’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. Thanks to Andrei Gelasimov’s gift for cinematic scene-setting, you might feel like you’ve just returned from Siberia and are shaking a case of delirium tremens when you finish reading.