"Lebedev . shows himself a master craftsman of words and sentences, and his translator Antonina W. Bouis matches him every step of the way in English, allowing his prose, peppered with abstract nouns and lists, to have a clear, taut sound . He has long been compared to Solzhenitsyn, and he has continued the older writer''s work of exhuming Soviet crimes."--On the Seawall "Set in Ukraine in 2014, Sergei Lebedev''s novel explores continuities of state control and suppression . writing both critically and imaginatively about the ongoing here and now . visionary in how he renders the historical horrors."--The Financial Times "In the transfixing latest from Russian writer Lebedev, the ghosts of wars past are exhumed in 2014 eastern Ukraine .
juxtaposes stark and horrifying present-day images, such as bodies falling from a passenger plane shot down by Russian forces, with lyrical impressions . It''s a bleak and electrifying tour de force."--Publishers Weekly (Starred review) "In Sergei Lebedev''s harrowing novel The Lady of the Mine murdered souls buried in an abandoned Ukrainian coal mine haunt the country''s emerging conflict with Russia . With poetic intensity and unflinching imagery . reveals obscured atrocities while creating hellish landscapes of the past and present."--Foreword Reviews "A monumental feat. Lebedev mines the blackest seams of the Soviet Union''s past and Russian''s more recent to conjure up a book of rare elemental power that lays bare the dark forces driving Putin''s Russia today. There is no braver and more important writer of his generation.
"--Catherine Belton, author of Putin''s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West "Lebedev''s new novel is magnificent, a haunted, disturbing book. In Eastern Ukraine, an old mine holds thick sediments of human bones and souls, but there has been no reckoning, no trial of those who killed. You cannot read this cry for justice without wishing that the dead might finally speak--and that they might be heard."--Catherine Merridale, author of Lenin on the Train "The Lady of the Mine in Antonina W. Bouis''s magnificent English translation highlights Russia''s efforts to sow division within the Donbas in 2014, delving into the region''s legacy of atrocities via an abandoned mine shaft . Lebedev is a trained geologist, and his novels are full of traces of history recorded in the earth."--The Los Angeles Review of Books "A story full of both striking beauty and unsettling violence . Taut with paradox and stacked with symbolism, Lebedev''s novel resists surface readings .
to explore what cannot be buried, compressed or contained in rock, and what cannot be scrubbed away by human hands,"--Jewish Book Council "Sergei Lebedev''s new novel offers his most haunting exploration yet of how guilt wreaks moral havoc across generations . The Lady of the Mine vividly weaves together the voices of victims and perpetrators of Soviet terror, the Holocaust, and 20th and 21st century wars. Its urgent appeal for responsibility and repentance could not be more timely." --Polly Jones , author of Gulag Fiction "Lebedev has written a tough work of historical fiction that slowly builds toward a series of translucent revelations . The Lady of the Mine is an important novel that uses death and the denial of its memory to make a case for how poorly we understand the wants of the victims of fascism, forgetting that even those without life still deserve dignity."--PopMatters "Disturbing . I have read nothing so descriptive and efficient in communicating the grim and ghastly effects of the war on the Donetsk region as Lebedev''s remarkable novel."--Russian Life Praise for Sergei Lebedev''s earlier books: "A tour de force--exquisite and gripping, finely translated, fiction that pulls you into the beautiful and brutal service of imagining and understanding the human realities of modern Russia, a series of tales meticulously crafted and deeply imagined.
"--Philippe Sands, author of East West Street, The Ratline, and The Last Colony "Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country''s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness . The best of Russia''s younger generation of writers."--The New York Review of Books "A geologist by training, Lebedev''s fiction excavates what lies beneath: the inner lives of earlier generations, buried under layers of official myth and self-deceit . the strange dualism that allows loving fathers to serve tyranny by day and to tuck their children up at night."--The Guardian.