About this item
Racing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Hélène, for whom he feels an uncanny trust.
A complicity quickly grows between the two when he manages to urgently ask - through a pantomime and basic Russian that Hélène must decipher - for her help to hide him. They hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Hélène’s first-class sleeping car. Aliocha now a hunted deserter and Hélène his accomplice with her own inner landscape of recent memories to contend with.
About the Author
Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels in French: Je marche sous un ciel de traîne (2000) , La vie voyageuse (2003) , Corniche Kennedy (2008) , and Naissance d'un pont (translated here as Birth of a Bridge, winner of the Franz Hessel Prize and the Médicis Prize in 2010) . She has also published a collection of short stories, Ni fleurs ni couronnes (2006) , and a novella, Tangente vers l'est (winner of the 2012 Landerneau Prize) . In addition, she has published a fiction tribute to Kate Bush and Blondie titled Dans les rapides (2007) . In 2014, her fifth novel, Réparer les vivants, was published to wide acclaim, winning the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama. She lives in Paris, France.