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Library Journal (Starred review)

“An extraordinary book that takes readers across Russia’s desolate northern landscape and turns up secrets about the terrible legacy of the Soviet gulags, described through evocative, often poetic portraits of people and places.”

—Celestine Bohlen, International New York Times columnist and former Moscow correspondent for The New York Times

“Extraordinarily intense and beautifully written … Oblivion haunts this novel. By writing it, Lebedev has given the past a present and a presence.”

—Judy Dempsey, senior associate at Carnegie Europe and editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe

“Sergei Lebedev’s debut novel is a haunting tale about the loss of national memory and its moral consequences for the individual.”

—Solomon Volkov, author of Shostakovich and Stalin, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, and The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn

Oblivion is the poetic monologue of a post-Soviet flâneur reflecting on the nation’s grim past. Pastoral vignettes about peaceful dacha life quickly morph into a novelistic version of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’.”

—Serguei A. Oushakine, Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

“A monomaniacal meditation on memory and forgetting… Lebedev’s magnificent novel has the potency to become a mirror and a wake-up call to a Russia that is blind to history.”

Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“Sergei Lebedev opens up new territory in literature. Lebedev’s prose lives from the precise images and the author’s colossal gift of observation.”

Der Spiegel

“The beauty of the language is almost impossible to bear. The novel luxuriates in poetic language.”

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Also from New Vessel Press

THE 6:41 TO PARIS BY JEAN-PHILIPPE BLONDEL

Cécile, a stylish 47-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents outside Paris. By Monday morning, she’s exhausted. These trips back home are stressful and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it’s soon occupied by a man she recognizes as Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation 30 years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, Cécile and Philippe hurtle towards the French capital in a psychological thriller about the pain and promise of past romance.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-641-to-paris/

ON THE RUN WITH MARY BY JONATHAN BARROW

Shining moments of tender beauty punctuate this story of a youth on the run after escaping from an elite English boarding school. At London’s Euston Station, the narrator meets a talking dachshund named Mary and together they’re off on escapades through posh Mayfair streets and jaunts in a Rolls-Royce. But the youth soon realizes that the seemingly sweet dog is a handful; an alcoholic, nymphomaniac, drug-addicted mess who can’t stay out of pubs or off the dance floor. On the Run with Mary mirrors the horrors and the joys of the terrible 20th century.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/on-the-run-with-mary/

THE LAST WEYNFELDT BY MARTIN SUTER

Adrian Weynfeldt is an art expert in an international auction house, a bachelor in his mid-fifties living in a grand Zurich apartment filled with costly paintings and antiques. Always correct and well-mannered, he’s given up on love until one night—entirely out of character for him—Weynfeldt decides to take home a ravishing but unaccountable young woman and gets embroiled in an art forgery scheme that threatens his buttoned up existence. This refined page-turner moves behind elegant bourgeois facades into darker recesses of the heart.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-last-weynfeldt/

ANIMAL INTERNET BY ALEXANDER PSCHERA

Some 50,000 creatures around the globe—including whales, leopards, flamingoes, bats and snails—are being equipped with digital tracking devices. The data gathered and studied by major scientific institutes about their behavior will warn us about tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but also radically transform our relationship to the natural world. Contrary to pessimistic fears, author Alexander Pschera sees the Internet as creating a historic opportunity for a new dialogue between man and nature.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/animal-internet/

THE LAST SUPPER BY KLAUS WIVEL

Alarmed by the oppression of 7.5 million Christians in the Middle East, journalist Klaus Wivel traveled to Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories to learn about their fate. He found a minority under threat of death and humiliation, desperate in the face of rising Islamic extremism and without hope their situation will improve. An unsettling account of a severely beleaguered religious group living, so it seems, on borrowed time. Wivel asks, Why have we not done more to protect these people?

http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-last-supper/

GUYS LIKE ME BY DOMINIQUE FABRE

Dominique Fabre, born in Paris and a lifelong resident of the city, exposes the shadowy, anonymous lives of many who inhabit the French capital. In this quiet, subdued tale, a middle-aged office worker, divorced and alienated from his only son, meets up with two childhood friends who are similarly adrift. He’s looking for a second act to his mournful life, seeking the harbor of love and a true connection with his son. Set in palpably real Paris streets that feel miles away from the City of Light, a stirring novel of regret and absence, yet not without a glimmer of hope.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/guys-like/

KILLING AUNTIE BY ANDRZEJ BURSA

A young university student named Jurek, with no particular ambitions or talents, finds himself with nothing to do. After his doting aunt asks the young man to perform a small chore, he decides to kill her for no good reason other than, perhaps, boredom. This short comedic masterpiece combines elements of Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kafka, and Heller, coming together to produce an unforgettable tale of murder and— just maybe—redemption.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/killing-auntie/

I CALLED HIM NECKTIE BY MILENA MICHIKO FLAŠAR