ELKOST International literary agency - Ludmila Ulitskaya's public lectures in Japan

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...

Didar and Faruk, a novel by Sana Valiulina

Rights sold: Germany - KNAUS, Netherlands - Meulenhoff

An epic love story in the narrative tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but this time with Stalinist Russia as the vivid backdrop: Didar en Faroek, by the Tatar Sana Valiulina, who lives in the Netherlands and writes in Dutch, is a book of international allure. Never before has this period been so convincingly and majestically articulated in a novel.

Didar and Faruk are distant cousins from a Tatar family that was dispersed in the displacement of ethnic groups in Russia in the 1920s. Didar grows up in the town of Pushkin, near St Petersburg, and Faruk in the centre of Moscow, which, at the time, was inhabited by multi-racial peoples from southern Russia. As in a fairy tale, Didar and Faruk are made for one another, and although the course of history keeps them apart for years, they succeed in keeping their...

Ludmila Ulitskaya's public lectures in Japan - November 2009

Featured titles

INTO THE THICKENING FOG, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov

Didar and Faruk, a novel by Sana Valiulina