"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 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 "One of Russia's most prominent contemporary writers, Lebedev, 41, has been hailed for a series of novels that hold a mirror up to Russia's blighted past.

A former geologist, he chips away at the deep strata of his country's 20th century history, the seams of trauma concealed by a state-sanctioned campaign of oblivion."--The Financial Times "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.