Winner of the National Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Award
Winner of the Read Russia Prize 2016
Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize 2016
In fifteenth-century Russia a young healer, skilled in the art of herbs and remedies, finds himself overcome with grief and guilt when he fails to save the one he loves. Leaving behind his village, his possessions and his name, he sets out on a quest for redemption, penniless and alone. But this is no ordinary journey.
Winner of two of the biggest literary prizes in Russia, Laurus is a remarkably rich novel about the eternal themes of love, loss, self-sacrifice and faith, from one of the country’s most experimental and critically acclaimed novelists.
‘At once stylistically ornate and compulsively readable… delivered with great aplomb and narrative charm.’
‘With flavours of Umberto Eco and The Canterbury Tales, this affecting, idiosyncratic novel… is an impressive achievement.’
Shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the National Big Book Award
A man wakes up in a hospital bed, with no idea who he is or how he came to be there. The only information the doctor shares with him is his name: Innokenty Petrovich Platonov.
As memories slowly resurface, Innokenty begins to build a vivid picture of his former life as a young man in Russia in the early twentieth century, living through the turbulence of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Soon, only one question remains: how can he remember the start of the twentieth century, when the pills by his bedside were made in 1999?
Reminiscent of the great works of twentieth-century Russian literature, with nods to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Bulgakov’s The White Guard, The Aviator cements Vodolazkin’s position as the rising star of Russia’s literary scene.
‘Vodolazkin’s grip on this narrative is iron-tight… We should expect nothing less from an author whose previous novel, Laurus, was a barnstorming thriller about medieval virtue.’