The Lady of the Mine
Sergei Lebedev author Antonina W Bouis translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:24th Apr '25
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 24th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The extraordinary new novel by the author of Untraceable.
A sealed shaft in a Donbas coal mine contains unimaginable horror: layer upon layer of human bodies, the victims of Red and White terror during the Revolution, of Stalin’s purges, of the Einsatzgruppen in the Holocaust.
Around this infamous pit, in a polluted region convulsed once again by war and cruelty when Russia invades Ukraine, the fates of four characters intertwine: a mysterious and powerful laundress whose dedication to cleaning the filth created by the mine attracts the suspicion of the secret police; her innocent daughter Zhanna, left alone by her mother’s death; a brutal Russian militia man, who targets Zhanna; and his boss, a former KGB man turned ruthless servant of Putin. The voice of The Engineer, a murdered Jew who designed and constructed the mine, is a witness to the bloody history of the region and the terrible secret at its heart.
A haunting, lyrical meditation on the legacy of dictatorship and atrocity.
Set in Ukraine in 2014, Sergei Lebedev’s 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 *
The Lady of the Mine in Antonina W. Bouis’s magnificent English translation highlights Russia’s efforts to sow division within the Donbas in 2014, delving into the region’s 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 Lebedev’s harrowing novel The Lady of the Mine, murdered souls buried in an abandoned Ukrainian coal mine haunt the country’s 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 writer’s work of exhuming Soviet crimes. * On the Seawall *
ISBN: 9781035917662
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages