Leonid Yuzefovich is telling a hardly known episode, the last battle of the Russian Revolution. In this twice award-winning non-fictional novel WINTER ROAD, the author 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.
In Inga Kuznetsova’s novel INTERVALS, a near-future dystopian version of Russia, a special powder is used to destroy poetry books in libraries, poets are killed, and a Nobel Prize-winning poet is secretly kidnapped by government agents. The state has outlawed poets and poetry.
The reader is drawn into a cruel, convincingly naturalistic, and hauntingly surreal story of resistance where poets are supported by animals and objects which are also soulful beings gifted with consciousness. We hear them all narrate the story in a multiplicity of perspectives. As the tension between state and poetry builds to a bloody climax, the poet and his followers discover that nothing truly dies… The anti-utopia transforms into a utopia.
Aleksei Slapovski’s SHORT STORY WHICH WASN’T – one wouldn’t believe – is definitely going to be translated and published soon by Hungarian World Literature Magazine 1749.
In his new novel Aleksei Nikitin is telling the unique and touching true story of the famous boxer Goldinov who, after the German invasion of Ukraine, joins the partisan fighters in the forests behind the front line. Only by lucky coincidence does he survive and he joins the regular army as a soldier before being sent by the Ukrainian secret service on a life-threatening mission to Kiev occupied by the Nazis. Meanwhile Goldvinov‘s wife falls ill during evacuation and is separated from her daughter Bat-Ami.
Unique is the perspective – the attack of the Germans seen through the eyes of a boxer and assimilated Jew.
The novel is set during the tragic few weeks in June-July 1941, when the German army in a sudden attack defeated the Red Army and within a few days occupied Lithuania. Grigori Kanovich’s writing is informed by his deep native knowledge of the Lithuanian countryside where he grew up in the 1930s, but he is no less intimately familiar with the Russian and Jewish cultures. Yet his real interest as a writer is in exploring the fundamental and universal ethical conflict between good and evil, which transcends the limits of concrete space and time.
«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 EBRD Literature Prize
Welcome to Russia 2032. There is peace in the world. Russia, Europe, the United States and China signed a convention with Russia: in exchange for its own security, the West no longer cares how the Russian government treats its citizens under its isolated power and only occasionally checks whether foreign policy agreements are respected. Russia is fenced and the borders are closed.
The hyper-real political landscape of Aleksei Fedyarov’s novel SFUMATO – DEAD BIRDS ARE FLYING is explicitly not post-apocalyptic, but rather develops consistently from today’s political realities.
And Fedyarov knows both sides of the barbed wire by own experience. Lawyer by education he was an investigator for the public prosecutor’s office for ten years, then later as a business man sentenced and sent to a prison camp in the Urals, today a human rights activist and head of the legal department of a Charity Fund that helps Russian prisoners and their families.
The sequel to SFUMATO will be published in August: making another step forward into 2044 and into the zone of longed-for freedom: AGAMI. A place you can only get through riot.
Nik Perumov started as a fantasy fan translating Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into Russian in the early 1980s which was the start to a Tolkien-mania in Russia. In the early 1990ies he published his own first fantasy series RING OF DARKNESS which provoked a controversy in the Tolkien fandom but established his fame as the most successful Russian fantasy author with more than 12 Mio copies sold in total.
The Empire’s capital is struck by the news of Heir Prince Khefer’s sudden death. And once again the heavy footsteps of Father of War echo at Taur-Duat’s borders. And Emperor Sekenef must choose a new heir between his two children remaining in the LAND OF THE LIVING. But who can accept an unbearable burden of power from his weakening hands? Would it be young warlike prince Renef, eager and willing to avenge his brother’s death, or princess Aniret whose wisdom belies her years?
The setting of Anna Nikitina’s series in 3 volumes reflects an Ancient Egyptian concept of a non-direct, only partial personification of the deities, who are quite real and influence the lives and decisions of the characters, but not through direct interference – rather through the signs, mystical phenomena, and through the actions of the mortals.
Anna Nikitina was born in Moscow and later on moved to New York. She graduated from St. John’s University and holds a an MBA in Public Accounting.
English sample available (50 pages).
By using this hardly known episode of the very last battle of the Russian Revolution in his twice award-winning narrative non-fiction book, 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.
5 languages sold so far: Bulgarian, French, Polish, Serbian, Latvian
The agency is proud to present MAX MAXIMOV, the new star of Russian science fiction delivered 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.
5 novels so far, 3 available in full English:
GATE TO HEAVEN – an innocent girl and a care robot in a novel about consciousness, the soul and AI
TO MARS! – simulacra and theories about space and time; in the spirit of „Atlas Shrugged“ by Ayn Rand
GOOD MAN – a hero with Down’s syndrome in a novel about the two faces of good and evil and the one-dimensionality of our view on the world
«It’s a synthesis of fiction, an attack on post-modernism and the energy of experiment.»
LIVELIB Reviewer
Maximov has 3.14m YouTube followers and 100,000 downloads of his novels per year.