On April 21, 2015, Alexei Makushinsky's novel Steamship to Argentina became a winner of the 2015 Russian Literary Award.
(c) photos: www.yeltsincenter.ru
Featured titles
Poison and Honey, a novel by Yuri Buida (2014)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Russia - EKSMO, Serbia - GEOPOETIKA
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ivan Belkin literary award
Yuri Buida’s Poison and Honey is a modern Russian family saga that focuses on a house and a family, the Osorins, covering lives, ambitions, and deaths, including murder most foul. Buida manages to weave together what sometimes feels like legions of characters and an entire history book of world culture, creating a compact, packed story that’s realistic, mythical, and metaphysical. It’s also strangely enjoyable and even more strangely suspenseful.
Buida’s first-person narrator is Semyon Semyonovich, who’s not, by blood, an Osorin but who becomes part of the extended family when his grandfather, a physician’s assistant, brings him to the Osorins’ house as a little boy. The house, which is set on a hill, is sometimes known as the House of the Twelve Angels. The house is magnificent, and it contains...
Read moreGod of Rain, a novel by Maya Kucherskaya (2006)
Rights sold: Croatia - Zagrebacka naklada, Russia - AST
Student Booker Prize (2007)
God of Rain is a short novel, dynamically plotted and with none of the excesses we have come to associate with “youth” novels. Quite the opposite, it is the story of Anya, a nice, well-educated young woman, who graduates from college as promising young intellectual. She starts her philological studies in Moscow University, but falls into a deep depression, and converts to active Orthodoxy. Her conversion leaves her firmly determined to go to live in a monastery. But instead she falls in love with her spiritual father and ultimately emigrates to Canada. Throughout all of this, she remains a virgin and a profound spiritual seeker.
In this novel we have a fresh view on the involvement of the young people in the new Orthodox wave that seems to be overflowing in Russia...
Read more