Guzel Yakhina is the most striking debutante in the history of modern Russian literature, winner of the Bolshaya Kniga and Yasnaya Polyana awards, and author of the bestsellers Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes and My Children. Her new book, Echelon to Samarkand, is a travel novel and a kind of "red western." The year is 1923. Echelon commander Deyev and Commissar Belaya evacuate five hundred homeless children from Kazan to Samarkand. A series of exciting and scary adventures along the way, a vast geography - from the forests of the Volga region and the Kazakh steppes to the deserts of Kyzyl-Kum and the mountains of Turkestan, a palette of destinies and characters: peasant refugees, security officers, Cossacks, an eccentric world of little vagabonds with their language, psychology, superstition and hopes... "I can say that such books are born very rarely and change everyone who reads them. We all remember this feeling from Platonov: what you read changed you. In my memory, there also loomed the travels of Marco Polo and Afanasy Nikitin to the unattainable luxurious East, to the land of satiety and cruel brutality, the craving for warmth, for terrible warmth, for heat, for a mirage in the desert. And this, thank God, is also a Robinsonade. A genre that promises salvation in the finale..." (Elena Kostyukovich)
Author: Guzel Yakhina
Edited by: Elena Shubina
Year of release: 2021
Publisher: AST Publishing House
Pages: 512
Cover type: Hardcover
Dimensions : 147x217x29 mm
ISBN: 978-5-17-135479-4