The Dream Life of Sukhanov

“English is Grushin’s third language. Yet so accomplished are her skills—so hauntingly assured—that more than one U.S. critic has greeted her as the next great American novelist…. To write a novel as good as this you need to be very talented. And Grushin is.”

— Financial Times

“This magnificent novel celebrates surrealistic painting by being surrealistic itself and makes the moral point that artistic integrity, at any cost, is ultimately more rewarding than compromised celebrity. In the context of Soviet Russia, where insistence on the right to freedom of artistic expression could have fatal consequences, this theme is particularly dramatic. But freedom of expression is constantly threatened everywhere, by all kinds of forces, some overt and some subtle, so this specifically Russian story has universal resonance…. Grushin is a Russian writing in English—such astonishingly beautiful English that it is almost impossible to believe it is not her first language…. This is an outstanding novel. It’s a first one, too [and] with it, Grushin raises the bar for first novels. Like all excellent works… it fills one with joy, because it works on every level.”

— The Irish Times

“Sophisticated, ironic and witty, multilayered, intricately constructed, deeply informed, elegantly written…. One of the many marks of Grushin’s wisdom and maturity is that Sukhanov, whom it would be easy to set up as a straw man, is a deeply complex, endlessly interesting and sympathetic figure. Nobody in The Dream Life of Sukhanov is fashioned out of cardboard. Every character evolves as the book progresses, turning into someone the reader had not quite expected… all are viewed and portrayed with compassion, as fallible human beings caught in circumstances not conducive to true nobility or true villainy…. Make no mistake, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is the work of a true artist…. In its expansiveness, its refusal to dwell in the tiny palace of self, it harks back to the great Russian masters. In so doing it breathes new life into American literary fiction.”

— Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

“Ironic, surreal [and] Gogolesque in its sardonic humor.”

— The New York Times

“Here’s a contemporary novel so good I felt like buying ten copies and sending them to friends…. Reminiscent now of Nabokov, now of Bulgakov [it‘s] a stunning fiction debut, and a book which reminds us of what a superb contribution the Russian tradition has made, and can still make, to literary art, compared with our own fallen and humdrum literary world.”

— The Independent (London)

“Olga Grushin’s haunting dreamscape of her native land is a debut to be cheered here, there and everywhere.”

— Dan Cryer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Subtle and vertiginous.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“Sukhanov ends the novel as a species of holy fool. In mad times, madness is a perfectly authentic response. But he is true to his vision at last, and Grushin has been true to hers.”

— The Observer (London)

“Brilliant work from a newcomer who is already an estimable American writer.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“The Dream Life of Sukhanov is Olga Grushin’s first novel, although you’d never guess it…. Evoking a time and place vivid in its particulars, Grushin draws universal lessons, an achievement made all the more impressive by the fact that English isn’t her native language.”

— Bloomberg.com

“Sinuous prose that shifts seamlessly from third to first person, between present and past, in and out of dreams and hallucinations… in Grushin’s wonderful novel, the incandescent wealth of Russia’s literary heritage blazes.”

— Daily Telegraph (London)

“Olga Grushin’s hallucinatory tale of a member of the Soviet privilegentsia discovering the price of his pact with the devil boldly collapses past into present, dream into reality, bitterness into sweetness, rising to heights of artful virtuosity rare in any book, let alone a first novel. Steeped in the tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov, and Nabokov, Grushin is clearly a writer of large and original talent.”

— James Lasdun

“The Dream Life of Sukhanov will tower over the majority of what publishers put out this year. Grushin’s beautifully constructed puzzle is a triumph of singular yet universal genius.”

— New York Magazine