Dmitri Zakharov – Moscow Banksy

new representation

a hyperrealistic political Moscow thriller

Suddenly, new graffiti appears in Moscow week after week with a clock-face in the corner, the painted hand creeping towards 12. The grotesque works of an anonymous graffiti artist each represent a different member of the new bureaucratic nomenklatura – each of whom dies shortly afterwards. This is the visible scene of Moscow in Dmitri Zakharov’s novel MOSCOW BANKSY (MIDDLE EDDA). At the same time, there is a political intrigue going on behind the scenes: the dismissal of the government, the long-prepared installation of a puppet candidate as deputy spokesman, who formally becomes the second man in the state. And the first, if something will happen to the president.

„A political crime thriller, an art anti-utopia, a Russian Dogville, a saga about the battle of the gods … But above all a vigilant and relentless diagnosis of the generation of the Russian 2000s, painful and on time.“ ALEKSANDR GAVRILOV

Grigori Kanovich – Devilspel

nomination award

DEVILSPEL in English translation on shortlist for the EBRD Literature Prize

Grigori Kanovich’s novel DEVILSPEL has been announced as finalist in the 2020 EBRD Literature Prize by the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the EBRD).

«Devilspel is a moving and elegant novel of fine character portraits, told in restrained but beautiful prose, set in a small town in Lithuania at a watershed moment of history, when ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust enter the lives of the local Jews and non-Jews alike, dividing neighbours and families into persecuted and persecutors.» ROSIE GOLDSMITH, Chair of the Judges

Galina Shatalova – Healing Nutrition

new sales

Romanian language rights have been sold to Editura Parallel 45

Two of Galina Shatalova’s famous books on alternative healing have been sold: CHOOSE YOUR WAY and HEALING NUTRITION.

The intention of Shatalova, as a doctor and as a person, is to return the human being to himself, to help him become as nature conceived and shaped him. For this reason she has created a natural healing method, concrete and theoretically founded. Inspired by the Hippocratic statement that our food should be our remedies and our remedies our food, Shatalova has developed a concept of natural reco- very. Her diet strictly opposes the calorie theory of balanced nutrition, which is contrary to human nature. According to her, the human organism is restricted exclusively to plant foods and does not need more than 250 to 400 calories of daily food intake to maintain its basic metabolism.

Anna Matveeva – The Dyatlov Pass

new sale

Latvian rights sold to Latvijas Mediji

Anna Matveeva’s novel THE DYATLOV PASS is dedicated to the true story of a group of young students who died under mysterious circumstances as ski tourists on the Dyatlov Pass in the northern Ural mountains in 1959. The exact circumstances of the mysterious deaths on Dyatlov Pass remain unexplained. Accompanying Matveeva’s heroine on her quest for the truth, therefore, the reader returns not only to a brutal past but is also drawn into discovering the truth behind the own life.

Grigori Kanovich – Shtetl Romance

new publication

Polish edition published by Pogranicze

A marvellous family novel, wise and pittoresque on the last 20 years of life in the Eastern European SHTETL . A moving piece of literature of a loss of the Jewish communities drawn by Grigory Kanovich in sympathetic detail against a backdrop of small-town life that is as vivid as anything in Tolstoy. Kanovich weaves into his narrative the long-held beliefs Jews clung to in a dangerous and unpredictable world.

Aleksei Ivanov – Heart of Parma

new sale

Arabic rights to Dar al-Kutub

Arabic language rights (after RIOT GOLD) also for the first historical novel by Aleksei Ivanov that made him famous, have been sold now: HEART OF PARMA.

Set in the 15th century, it is, at heart, the tale of conquest and clashing civilizations – the story of a Russian prince and a pagan chieftain, each unable to retreat from his nemesis, both crushed on the wheel of history, both destined to seek an impossible victory over one another and find it in tragedy and betrayal at the cost of their soul.

It was compared to Lord of the Rings and Beowulf; but one could rather say Shogun and Clan of the Cave Bear.

„An inimitable master of historical storytelling. His visionary way of writing about the past gives the reader the sense of being a participant in or witness of large-scale historical events, yet at the same time feeling very close to the novel’s protagonists. He unfolds a colourful, realistic large tableau of an epoch while managing to also portray deeply intimate, private moments in the lives of his characters. Frankly, I don’t know how he does it. He is a writer of enormous, magical talent.“
ELENA LAPPIN

Leonid Yuzefovich – Winter Road

new publication

French edition published by Noir sur Blanc

In St. Petersburg the Bolsheviks have already won the Civil War. But in the far east of Siberia, the Yakuts have dared to launch the final uprising against the Red Army. In his twice award-winning non-fictional novel WINTER ROAD, Leonid Yuzefovich is able to portray deeper human motives: the love, passion and individual suffering that are buried in the ideology are revealed and the characters shown to be both oppressor and victim. In the end each individual is responsible for the Russian tragedy.

Sergei Loiko – political thriller about flight MH17

The Flight

Enspired by true events, extensive research and war reporting of the former prize-winning Moscow Los Angeles Times correspondent. So far 4 languages sold.

This week the trial has opened in the Netherlands of three Russians and a Ukrainian – still at large – for the murder of 298 people aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 amid the conflict in eastern Ukraine, after Russian-backed rebels seized the area. Investigators say they have proof the Buk missile system that shot it down came from a military base in Russia.

Sergei Loiko covered the Ukrainian revolution and the subsequent war virtually nonstop from the first day until 2015. In 2014, for this reporting, Loiko was awarded one of the highest prizes in American journalism, the Overseas Press Club’s Bob Considine Award, “for its guts, credibility, originality, depth and sophistication of interpretation, and its engaging writing style”. He has also been awarded the prestigious Los Angeles Times editorial award for “Best Reporting in 2014”.

«The mainspring and quality of this novel is the human suffering and desire to discover the truth about the circumstances involved in the shooting down flight MH-17. This turns the novel into a genuine political thriller, one that we desperately need in our post-fac- tual world to be able to penetrate the cloud of lies covering the squalid conflict in the Ukraine.» Sergei Medvedev, Historian

New titles spring 2020 – London / Paris / Leipzig book fairs

new representations

Aleksei Fedyarov – Sfumato: Dead Birds are flying.

Welcome to Russia 2032. There is peace in the world. The world community has signed an agreement with Russia: in exchange for its own security, the West no longer cares how the Russian government treats its citizens under its isolated power. Russia is fenced and the borders are closed. The taiga is almost entirely cut down, the Chinese – Russia’s ‘fraternal allies’ – have founded productive farms on the permafrost. The whole country is divided into ‘clusters’: the more critical you are of the regime, the further away from Moscow you are banished.

This frightening dystopia, explicitly not post-apocalyptic, rather develops consistently from today’s political realities.

„An evil and sad dystopia – and the saddest part is that it’s probably true. The purity and power of its first part is in no way inferior to Orwell’s despair.“ VIKTOR SHENDEROVICH

 

Dmitry Zakharov – Middle Edda

New graffiti appears in Moscow week after week each representing a different member of the new bureaucratic nomenklatura – each of whom dies shortly afterwards. Spin doctors close to the Kremlin are frantically trying to reveal the identity of the anonymous artist. Other representatives of the corrupt vertical power are ready to pay huge sums for the next graffiti to show one of their opponents. A battle starts between those those really pulling the strings in the struggle for future power.

„Exactly the novel about here and now that we have been missing for so long. Chamber play and global epos at the same time; an emotional story about living people, an exciting thriller, a razor-sharp, socially critical drama.“ GALINA YUZEFOVICH

 

Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina – Uranium

1953, year of Stalin’s death. Soviet Estonia. The secret site, Combinat No. 7, is intended to ensure the uninterrupted supply of uranium for the Soviet nuclear project. A number of mysterious deaths suddenly puts everything in a different light. The external investigator sent from Leningrad encounters communist leaders engaging in cult and religious-orthodox occult practices, hypnosis and manipulation, sex and violence. The murders are brutal clues to who is really related to whom and how.

Like an exciting Netflix series, the plot of this historical novel, which is also a spy thriller, is told horizontally from the different perspectives.

“Nothing less than the exciting experience of fully immersing yourself into history, its reconstruction illuminating the mentalities of the time, but also trying to understand many of the central contradictions of that time.“ LITERATURNAYA GAZETA

 

Max Maximov – Gate to Heaven

Maximov’s short novels deliver science fiction in the best tradition of the Strugatski brothers. After a long predominance of purely entertaining genre literature such as fantasy, horror or post-apocalypse, in Russia his books are seen as an original revival of philosophical science fiction. They are also timely parables exploring guilt and innocence, hell and paradise, life and spirit, nothingness and the morality of algorithms.

GATE TO HEAVEN is a novel about consciousness, the soul and artificial intelligence.

Maximov has 3.14m YouTube followers and 100,000 downloads of his novels per year.

 

Aleksandr Fuflygin – God’s Plan. The interpretation of truth.

The task that the author has set himself is a bold one: to provide a reading with which all the mysteries of the Bible can be solved in a comprehensible way, not contradicting the latest scientific findings and leaving no ‘blank spots’ in his interpretation of the Bible.

The seemingly most incomprehensible things, phenomena, events or images in the Bible, such as the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge, the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, the Flood and Noah’s Ark, the resurrection of Jesus and much more, suddenly take on a clear meaning in this reading.

For confirmed Orthodox believers the book might be a sacrilege. More open-minded spirits, whether religious or agnostic, will be more and more astonished with every further Bible verse. One often puts the book aside with a pounding heart and asks oneself, ‘This can’t be true!’