THE YEAR OF THE COMET

Name: THE YEAR OF THE COMET
Author: Sergei Lebedev
ISBN: 978-1-939931-4-12

by Sergei Lebedev translated by Antonina W. Bouis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

This gorgeously written, unsettling novel—a rare work about the fall of the Soviet Union as told through the eyes of a...

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Lebedev follows up Oblivion (2016), his powerful novel about the atrocities of the gulag, with this autobiographical tale of a boy's coming-of-age during the years leading to the fall of the Soviet Union.

A "child of an earthquake" who was shaken from his mother's womb in Moscow by tectonic waves emanating from Bucharest, our unnamed protagonist spends much of the novel trying to shake the unsettled state into which he was born. The unspoken past, his country's and his family's, is no mere backdrop for his adventures. The ghostly mysteries of the Stalin era and its aftermath impinge on his every thought and feeling, intensified by his discovery of simple objects that provide clues to his family's participation in those events. The boy is largely raised by his war-widowed grandmothers, one of peasant stock, the other from a noble line, both tied in different ways to the Communist Party. As the system unravels, chaos increasingly infects people's lives, as does a "tyranny of necessities" emblematized by the ready availability of shoes but not spare shoelaces. The Chernobyl disaster deepens our hero's free-floating fear and intensifies his desire to create his own alternative reality. He pursues a friendship with an enigmatic adult named Ivan and risks contact with a child killer called Mister who is on the loose outside his family's dacha. While the latter half of the book has a certain romantic streak in introducing the hero to personal freedom, or at least the possibility of letting down his guard, the obsessive early sections boast such a relentless, close-in intensity the effect can be claustrophobic. But it's a good kind of claustrophobia: you read and reread Lebedev's lyrical, cutting prose with equal amounts of awe and enjoyment.

This gorgeously written, unsettling novel—a rare work about the fall of the Soviet Union as told through the eyes of a child—leaves us with a fresh understanding of that towering moment in recent history.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-939931-4-12

Page Count: 275

Publisher: New Vessel Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
UNTRACEABLE
by Sergei Lebedev

- BOOK REVIEW
OBLIVION
by Sergei Lebedev ; translated by Antonina W. Bouis

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A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

by Khaled Hosseini ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 2007

Another artistic triumph, and surefire bestseller, for this fearless writer.

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This Afghan-American author follows his debut (The Kite Runner, 2003) with a fine risk-taking novel about two victimized but courageous Afghan women.

Mariam is a bastard. Her mother was a housekeeper for a rich businessman in Herat, Afghanistan, until he impregnated and banished her. Mariam’s childhood ended abruptly when her mother hanged herself. Her father then married off the 15-year-old to Rasheed, a 40ish shoemaker in Kabul, hundreds of miles away. Rasheed is a deeply conventional man who insists that Mariam wear a burqa, though many women are going uncovered (it’s 1974). Mariam lives in fear of him, especially after numerous miscarriages. In 1987, the story switches to a neighbor, nine-year-old Laila, her playmate Tariq and her parents. It’s the eighth year of Soviet occupation—bad for the nation, but good for women, who are granted unprecedented freedoms. Kabul’s true suffering begins in 1992. The Soviets have gone, and rival warlords are tearing the city apart. Before he leaves for Pakistan, Tariq and Laila make love; soon after, her parents are killed by a rocket. The two storylines merge when Rasheed and Mariam shelter the solitary Laila. Rasheed has his own agenda; the 14-year-old will become his second wife, over Mariam’s objections, and give him an heir, but to his disgust Laila has a daughter, Aziza; in time, he’ll realize Tariq is the father. The heart of the novel is the gradual bonding between the girl-mother and the much older woman. Rasheed grows increasingly hostile, even frenzied, after an escape by the women is foiled. Relief comes when Laila gives birth to a boy, but it’s short-lived. The Taliban are in control; women must stay home; Rasheed loses his business; they have no food; Aziza is sent to an orphanage. The dramatic final section includes a murder and an execution. Despite all the pain and heartbreak, the novel is never depressing; Hosseini barrels through each grim development unflinchingly, seeking illumination.

Another artistic triumph, and surefire bestseller, for this fearless writer.

Pub Date: May 22, 2007

ISBN: 1-59448-950-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
SEA PRAYER
by Khaled Hosseini ; illustrated by Dan Williams

- BOOK REVIEW
AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED
by Khaled Hosseini

- BOOK REVIEW
THE KITE RUNNER
by Khaled Hosseini

- BOOK TO SCREEN
‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ TV Series in Works

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.