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Red Crosses
“Lays bare the . . . history of a ruthless Russian state with the story of an unlikely friendship between a young widower and a survivor of Stalin’s gulag.” —Publishers Weekly Sasha Filipenko traces the arc of Russian history from Stalin’s terror to the present day, in a novel full of heart and humanity. One struggles not to forget, while the other would like nothing better. Tatiana Alexeyevna is an old woman, over ninety, rich in lived experience, and suffering from Alzheimer’s. Every day, she loses a few more of her irreplaceable memories. Alexander is a young father whose life has been brutally torn in two by the untimely death of his wife. Tatiana tells her young neighbor her...
Red Crosses
SHORTLISTED: EBRD LITERATURE PRIZE 2022 "If you want to get inside the head of modern, young Russia, read Filipenko."—SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH (Nobel Prize winner, 2015) A heart-wrenching novel exploring both personal and collective memory spanning Russian history from Stalin's terror to the present day. Tatiana Alexeyevna is 90 years old and she's losing her memory. To find her way in her Soviet-era apartment block, she resorts to painting red crosses on the doors leading back to her apartment. But she still remembers the past in vivid detail. Alexander, a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two, would like nothing better than to forget the tragic events that have brought him to Minsk. When he moves into the flat next door to Tatiana's, he's cornered by the loquacious old lady. Reluctant at first, he's soon drawn into Tatiana's life story – one told urgently, before her memories of the Russian 20th century and its horrors are wiped out. The two forge an unlikely friendship, a pact against forgetting giving rise to a new sense of hope in the future. Deeply moving, with flashes of humour, Red Crosses is a shining narrative in the tradition of the great Russian novel.
My Grandmother's Braid
Sharp and tender at once, a humourous take on family dysfunction and human weakness seen through a young boy's eyes. Max lives with his grandparents in a residential home for refugees in Germany. When his grandmother—a terrifying, stubborn matriarch and a former Russian primadonna—moved them from the Motherland, it was in search of a better life. But she is not at all pleased with how things are run in Germany. His grandmother has been telling Max that he is an incompetent, clueless weakling since he was a child. While he may be dolt in his grandmother's eyes, Max is bright enough to notice that his stoic and taciturn grandfather has fallen hopelessly in love with their neighbour, Nina. When a child is born to Nina that is the spitting image of Max's grandfather, things come to a hilarious if dramatic head. Everybody will have to learn to defend themselves from Max's all-powerful grandmother.
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine
Rosa Achmetowna is the outrageously mischievous narrator of this rollicking family saga from the author of Broken Glass Park. When Rosa discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, "stupid Sulfia," is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. But despite her best efforts the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. Much to Rosa's surprise and delight, dark-eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother's eye. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Ros...
Just Call Me Superhero
An atmospheric evocation of modern Berlin, a vivid portrait of youth under pressure, and a moving story about learning to love, this new novel from the author of Broken Glass Park is an irreverent look at the sometimes difficult work of self-acceptance. Badly disfigured as a result of an encounter with a dog, seventeen-year-old Marek begins attending a support group for young people with physical disabilities, which he dubs "the cripple group," led by an eccentric older man known only as The Guru. Marek is dismissive of the other members of the support group, seeing little connection between their misfortunes and his own. The one exception to this is Janne, the beautiful wheelchair-bound girl with whom he has fallen in love. When a family crisis forces Marek to face his demons, with or without the group, he finds himself in dire need of support. But the distance he has put between himself and The Guru's misshapen acolytes may well be too great to bridge. Just Call Me Superhero is destined to consolidate Alina Bronsky's reputation as one of her generation's most compelling and stylish young authors.
Baba Dunja's Last Love
Baba Dunja is a Chernobyl returnee. Together with a motley bunch of former neighbours, they set off to create a new life for themselves in the radioactive no-man's land. Geiger counter and irradiated forest fruits be damned, there in that abandoned patch of Earth they have everything they need. Terminally ill Petrov passes the time reading love poems in his hammock; Marja takes up with 100-year-old Sidorow; Baba Dunja whiles away her days writing letters to her daughter... rural bliss reigns, until one day a stranger turns up in the village, and the small settlement faces annihilation once again. With her trade-mark wry humour Bronsky tells the story of a community that shouldn't exist, and of a very unusual woman who late in life finds her own version of paradise.
Broken Glass Park
17-year-old Sascha Naimann lives in Berlin's Russian ghetto with her two younger siblings and, until recently, her mother. She is precocious, independent, street-wise, and, since her stepfather murdered her mother several months ago, an orphan. Unlike most of her companions, she doesn't dream of escaping from the tough housing project where they live. Sascha's dreams are different: she longs to write a novel about her beautiful but nave mother and kill her stepfather. Sacha's story, candid and self confident, relates her struggle.
Love in Five Acts
"Highly recommended" Sunday Times "Utterly captivating" Woman and Home "Sympathetic and clear-eyed" Financial Times Summer Reads of 2021 "Unfailingly impressive" Irish Times "Sparse and precise" Telegraph "Beautifully direct and lucid prose . . . fierce intelligence" Melbourne Age & Sydney Morning Herald "A beautiful novel of what it is to be a women in modern Europe" New European "An intelligent study of female desire, ambition and frailty" Observer Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until sh...
Memory Speaks
From an award-winning writer and linguist, a scientific and personal meditation on the phenomenon of language loss and the possibility of renewal. As a child Julie Sedivy left Czechoslovakia for Canada, and English soon took over her life. By early adulthood she spoke Czech rarely and badly, and when her father died unexpectedly, she lost not only a beloved parent but also her firmest point of connection to her native language. As Sedivy realized, more is at stake here than the loss of language: there is also the loss of identity. Language is an important part of adaptation to a new culture, and immigrants everywhere face pressure to assimilate. Recognizing this tension, Sedivy set out to un...
The Age of Uncertainty
The epic, page-turning history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth century. Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein didn't only revolutionise physics; they redefined our world and the reality we live in. In The Age of Uncertainty, Tobias Hürter brings to life the golden age of physics and its dazzling, flawed, and unforgettable heroes and heroines. He immerses us in a half century of global turmoil against which some of humankind's greatest and strangest scientific discoveries unfolded, expertly guiding us through the brilliant and mind-bending ideas that turned the world ...
