A Terrible Country

‘Keith Gessen’s second novel is a very funny, perceptive, exasperated, loving and timely portrait of a country that its author clearly knows well.... The refreshingly artless writing belies a deep understanding of Russia, its history and literature. Andrei digresses enlighteningly on Russian as a literary language, swearing, taxis, plumbing, ice hockey and the role played by global oil prices in the breakup of the Soviet Union.... If the last two bizarre years have taught us anything, it’s that Russia is never irrelevant. I wonder how many more drugged spies, bent elections and political murders it will take for the rest of the world to realise that, for existential reasons, it would be smart for us to pay it a little more consistent and nuanced attention. A Terrible Country would be an excellent and entertaining place to begin.’
— Marcel Theroux, Guardian

‘Gessen evokes not only convincingly, but indispensably, something exceedingly rare in modern American fiction: genuine male vulnerability. There’s enough heart here to redeem every recent male novel that’s aimed for it and found solipsism instead.… The novel manages to offer hard-won insight into an impossible place.… You won’t read a more observant book about the country that has now been America’s bedeviling foil for almost a century.’
— Boris Fishman, New York Times Book Review

‘A cause for celebration: big-hearted, witty, warm, compulsively readable, earnest, funny, full of that kind of joyful sadness I associate with Russia and its writers. Gessen’s particular gift is his ability to effortlessly and charmingly engage with big ideas – power, responsibility, despotism of various stripes, the question of what a country is supposed to do for the people who live in it – while still managing to tell a moving and entertaining human story. At a time when people are wondering whether art can rise to the current confusing political moment, this novel is a reassurance, from a wonderful and important writer.’
— George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo

‘A Terrible Country is even better than I hoped. By turns sad, funny, bewildering, revelatory, and then sad again, it recreates the historical-psychological experience of returning, for twenty-first-century reasons, to a country one’s parents left in the twentieth century. It’s at once an old-fashioned novel about the interplay between generational roles, family fates, and political ideology, and a kind of global detective mystery about neo-liberalism (plus a secret map of Moscow in terms of pickup hockey). Gessen is a master journalist and essayist, as well as a storyteller with a scary grasp on the human heartstrings, and A Terrible Country unites the personal and political as only the best novels do.’
— Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot 

‘Excellent ... In its breadth and depth, its sweep, its ability to move us and philosophize ... A Terrible Country is a smart, enjoyable, modern take on what we think of, admiringly, as “the Russian novel”— in this case, a Russian novel that only an American could have written.’
—Francine Prose, New York Review of Books

‘A Terrible Country tells the reader a lot about contemporary Russia and, importantly, lifts the lid on domestic political resistance to Putin. But what makes this a moving and thought-provoking novel is Andrei’s personal struggle to find his way in the world, his sense of obligation to his family and his realisation that his parents’ emigration — the very thing that has afforded him opportunities — was “the great tragedy of my grandmother’s life”.’
— Max Liu, Financial Times