Autostraddle , A Most Anticipated Queer Book of the Month LGBTQ Reads , A Most Anticipated Book of the Year "A clarifying portrait of post-Soviet Russian life, cycles of violence, and the ways that ideological training can seamlessly shift into behavior more suited for a criminal underworld. The more specific this narrative gets, the more searing its emotional connections become." --Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders "Searing . Vasyakina brings an astute, lyrical eye to the time that father and daughter spend together, much of it on the road . The novel takes a piercing look at what is typically ignored--the barren landscape of the steppe, working-class lives, and the shape of suffering of someone who refuses to treat his illness . Steppe is a poetic illumination of those who don't stop being and those who don't stop mattering, an ode to the harsh beauty of its titular landscape." --Anna Mebel, Asymptote "Short but haunting . [ Steppe ] is part of a trilogy investigating the deaths of members of Vasyakina's family.

But it is also a portrait of a certain class of Russians, and by extension the history of Russia itself . [An] intensely observant book." --Andrew Holleran, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide "An elegiac tribute to a fatally flawed bond." -- Kirkus Reviews "In this compassionate and clear-eyed character study, Vasyakina traces the bond between a rough-hewn Siberian truck driver and his queer daughter . Vasyakina assembles a thoughtful and necessarily incomplete portrait of the father from the narrator's musings on the harshness and violence of the post-Soviet era that shaped him. It's a satisfying examination of how well a father and daughter can know one another." -- Publishers Weekly "A family history, a road trip through contemporary Russia, Steppe is as unflinching and capacious as the landscape from which it takes its name. Vasyakina is a rare truthsayer, a voice of her generation.

I loved this." --Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of Ghost Pains "This is a gorgeously recursive book about daughters and fathers, about the unknowability. pain, and occasional tragedy of being fathered in the early twenty-first century, and the way we come to understand our own childhoods only as adults, when it's all too late. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like Steppe , and at times when I was reading it felt so real and heartbreaking I could hardly stand it." --Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest "In Vasyakina's prose, grief and isolation become luminous. When reading this dissociative and brilliant novel, one is reminded that to have a father is to inherit a fractured nation." --Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive.