The Blizzard

(Paperback)

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Description

A darkly comic dystopian odyssey, from one of Russia's leading contemporary novelists Garin, a country doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is transforming the villagers into zombies. He has with him a vaccine which will prevent the spread of this epidemic, but a terrible blizzard turns his journey into the stuff of nightmare. A trip that should take hours turns into a metaphysical odyssey, in which he encounters strange beasts, apparitions, hallucinations and dangerous fellow men. Trapped in this existential storm, Sorokin's characters fight their way through a landscape that owes as much to Chekhov's 19th-century Russia as it does to near-future, post-apocalyptic literature. Fantastical, comic and richly drawn, The Blizzard at once answers to the canon of Russian writers and makes a fierce statement about life in contemporary Russia.

Reviews

Vladimir Sorokin [is] Russia's most inventive contemporary author -- Masha Gessen * New York Times Book Review *

Author Bio

Vladimir Sorokin (born 1955) is the author of eleven novels, including The Blizzard, also published as a Penguin Modern Classic, The Ice Trilogy andThe Queue. His works have been translated into thirty languages and won many prizes, including the Andrei Bely Prize and the Maxim Gorky Prize. In 2013 he was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Moscow.