Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

“You, my grandson.” It was only on the third reading that I understood this was not a stylistic turn and that Grandmother truly was addressing me. I was the seventeenth generation of the line.

A swarm of dead men, previously invisible, appeared and turned into the rustle of August foliage, into moonlight, as if they had seeped one by one through a crack in time, into the joint of eras, awakened by the soldiers’ boots stomping on cobblestones, the fall of monuments, the rumble of tanks, and the din of the crowd.

The wind picked up and trees trembled in the dark, and I thought, honestly sensing my own smallness, that it would be better to destroy Grandmother’s manuscript and throw myself from the balcony; no one would understand, but living with this was more than I could bear. I had been counting on a personal truth, a small, manageable piece of it, and I had been given too much.

Mechanically, I reached out in a farewell gesture and touched an apple; we brought them from the dacha and kept them in boxes on the balcony. Sharp, angry, boiling with an excess of flavor, the juice burned my mouth; I discovered that I was like an animal, chewing and choking on that apple, enormous, juicy—the harvest had been a good one that August, the tree branches cracked under the weight of the fruit, even though we propped them up—and the desire to live seethed and raged within me.

I was to be born anew.

IF VENICE DIES BY SALVATORE SETTIS

INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED ART HISTORIAN Salvatore Settis ignites a new debate about the Pearl of the Adriatic and cultural patrimony at large. In this fiery blend of history and cultural analysis, Settis argues that “hit-and-run” visitors are turning Venice and other landmark urban settings into shopping malls and theme parks. This is a passionate plea to secure the soul of Venice, written with consummate authority, wide-ranging erudition and élan.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/if-venice-dies/

A VERY RUSSIAN CHRISTMAS

THIS IS RUSSIAN CHRISTMAS CELEBRATED IN supreme pleasure and pain by the greatest of writers, from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Chekhov and Teffi. The dozen stories in this collection will satisfy every reader, and with their wit, humor, and tenderness, packed full of sentimental songs, footmen, whirling winds, solitary nights, snow drifts, and hopeful children, the collection proves that Nobody Does Christmas Like the Russians.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/a-very-russian-christmas/

THE MADONNA OF NOTRE DAME BY ALEXIS RAGOUGNEAU

FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE JAM INTO NOTRE DAME Cathedral to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption. The next morning, a beautiful young woman clothed in white kneels at prayer in a cathedral side chapel. But when someone accidentally bumps against her, her body collapses. She has been murdered. This thrilling novel illuminates shadowy corners of the world’s most famous cathedral, shedding light on good and evil with suspense, compassion and wry humor.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/madonna-notre-dame/

MOVING THE PALACE BY CHARIF MAJDALANI

A YOUNG LEBANESE ADVENTURER EXPLORES THE wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan. This is a captivating modern-day Odyssey in the tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/moving-the-palace/

ADUA BY IGIABA SCEGO

ADUA, AN IMMIGRANT FROM SOMALIA TO ITALY, has lived in Rome for nearly forty years. She came seeking freedom from a strict father and an oppressive regime, but her dreams of film stardom ended in shame. Now that the civil war in Somalia is over, her homeland calls her. She must decide whether to return and reclaim her inheritance, but also how to take charge of her own story and build a future.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/adua/

THE 6:41 TO PARIS BY JEAN-PHILIPPE BLONDEL

CÉCILE, A STYLISH 47-YEAR-OLD, HAS SPENT the weekend visiting her parents outside Paris. By Monday morning, she’s exhausted. These trips back home are stressful and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it’s soon occupied by a man she recognizes as Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation 30 years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, Cécile and Philippe hurtle towards the French capital in a psychological thriller about the pain and promise of past romance.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-641-to-paris/

ON THE RUN WITH MARY BY JONATHAN BARROW

SHINING MOMENTS OF TENDER BEAUTY PUNCtuate this story of a youth on the run after escaping from an elite English boarding school. At London’s Euston Station, the narrator meets a talking dachshund named Mary and together they’re off on escapades through posh Mayfair streets and jaunts in a Rolls-Royce. But the youth soon realizes that the seemingly sweet dog is a handful; an alcoholic, nymphomaniac, drug-addicted mess who can’t stay out of pubs or off the dance floor. On the Run with Mary mirrors the horrors and the joys of the terrible 20th century.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/on-the-run-with-mary/

OBLIVION BY SERGEI LEBEDEV

IN ONE OF THE FIRST 21ST CENTURY RUSSIAN novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.

http://newvesselpress.com/books/oblivion/

THE LAST WEYNFELDT BY MARTIN SUTER

ADRIAN WEYNFELDT IS AN ART EXPERT IN AN international auction house, a bachelor in his mid-fifties living in a grand Zurich apartment filled with costly paintings and antiques. Always correct and well-mannered, he’s given up on love until one night—entirely out of character for him—Weynfeldt decides to take home a ravishing but unaccountable young woman and gets embroiled in an art forgery scheme that threatens his buttoned up existence. This refined page-turner moves behind elegant bourgeois facades into darker recesses of the heart.