Set in Ukraine in 2014, Sergei Lebedevs novel explores continuities of state control and suppression . . . writing both critically and imaginatively about the ongoing here and now . . . Lebedev is a trained geologist, and this is not his first novel to explore continuous human experiences and history with evocations of a grounded place that discloses layered depths. * Financial Times * A monumental feat. Lebedev mines the blackest seams of the Soviet Union's past and Russian's more recent to conjure up a book of rare elemental power that lays bare the dark forces driving Putin's Russia today. There is no braver and more important writer of his generation. * Catherine Belton, author of Putin's People * Lebedev's new novel is magnificent, a haunted, disturbing book. In Eastern Ukraine, an old mine holds thick sediments of human bones and souls, but there has been no reckoning, no trial of those who killed. You cannot read this cry for justice without wishing that the dead might finally speak and that they might be heard. * Catherine Merridale, author of Lenin on the Train * Sergei Lebedevs new novel offers his most haunting exploration yet of how guilt wreaks moral havoc across generations. Set in Donbas of the 2010s, it is his first work to tackle Russias war on Ukraine directly. Like all his novels, though, it links past and present together into a chain of catastrophes... The Lady of the Mine vividly weaves together the voices of victims and perpetrators of Soviet terror, the Holocaust and twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars. Its urgent appeal for responsibility and repentance could not be more timely amidst the ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. * Professor Polly Jones, author of Gulag Fiction * The Lady of the Mine in Antonina W. Bouiss magnificent English translation highlights Russias efforts to sow division within the Donbas in 2014, delving into the regions legacy of atrocities via an abandoned mine shaft . . . Lebedev is a trained geologist, and his novels are full of traces of history recorded in the earth. * Los Angeles Review of Books * In Sergei Lebedevs harrowing novel The Lady of the Mine, murdered souls buried in an abandoned Ukrainian coal mine haunt the countrys emerging conflict with Russia . . . With poetic intensity and unflinching imagery . . . reveals obscured atrocities while creating hellish landscapes of the past and present. * Foreword Reviews * A story full of both striking beauty and unsettling violence . . . Explore[ s] what cannot be buried, compressed, or contained in rock, and what cannot be scrubbed away by human hands. * Jewish Book Council * [ Lebedev] shows himself a master craftsman of words and sentences, and his translator Antonina W. Bouis matches him every step of the way in English He has long been compared to Solzhenitsyn, and he has continued the older writers work of exhuming Soviet crimes. * On the Seawall *
