Сергей Лебедев: Untraceable

—WILL ENGLUND, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post and author of March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution

“Sergei Lebedev is a marvelous writer with two rare gifts: a nobility of style and the most precise inner vision, which allows him to see and plumb the entire depth of the anthropological catastrophe that occurred in twentieth-century Russia. Lebedev has perceived what was invisible to most Soviet and post-Soviet writers.”

—VLADIMIR SOROKIN, author of The Blizzard, Day of the Oprichnik and Ice Trilogy

“One of Russia’s most interesting young novelists takes on Putin, poison and power in this unique novel; Lebedev provides a fascinating window on modern Russia.”

—ANNE APPLEBAUM, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe

“A spellbinding insight into a secret world that we forget at our peril, a world of assassins, spies, patriots and poison masters whose shockingly evil decisions are made in their unwavering belief of serving a greater good. A thrilling, haunting, essential read.”

—RORY MACLEAN, author of Pravda Ha Ha: Truth, Lies and the End of Europe

“Rich in textures, colors, sounds, and visual details… Lebedev is arguably the best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.”

— THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

“A Dantean descent… as cold and stark as a glacial crevasse, but as beautiful as one, too, with a clear poetic sensibility built to stand against the forces of erasure.”

— THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Astonishing… ingeniously structured around the progressive uncovering of memories of a difficult personal and national past… with a visceral, at times almost unbearable, force.”

— THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

First published in Russian in 2020 as Debutant

Copyright © 2019 Sergei Lebedev

Translation Copyright © 2021 Antonina W. Bouis

“O What Is That Sound,” Copyright © 1937 and renewed 1965 by W. H. Auden; from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lebedev, Sergei

[Debutant, English]

Untraceable/Sergei Lebedev; translation by Antonina W. Bouis.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-939931-90-0

Library of Congress Control Number 2020935328

I. Russia—Fiction