Wound

(Hardback)

Available Formats

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A breathtaking novel of grief, love, creativity and a young woman's queer and artistic awakening.

In the days after her mother's death from breast cancer, Oksana, a young queer poet, decides to return her mother's ashes to their working-class hometown in Siberia. It is a journey home that will take her through the raw, almost dreamlike emotions of early grief through to an acceptance of the wound that death leaves behind.

As she navigates the rituals of parting, Oksana feels her way through memory and heartache with a wry humour, reflecting on her complex relationship with her mother and on her own experiences of love, loss, sexuality and the search for home.

Powerful, lyrical and precise, this extraordinary debut is a novel which blurs the line between reality and creation. Wound is a both an exploration of grief and a journey towards love, happiness and creative fulfilment.

Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter

"This is not just an amazing novel, extremely frank, extremely accurate and extremely addictive, but, perhaps, a book about finding happiness" The Blueprint

"Wound is a poet's novel . . . a primer on feminist thought for readers with Pushkin in their veins" European Review of Books

Reviews

It is heartening to see public recognition of Vasyakina, a feminist activist and a lesbian, whose work does not hide but rather publicizes her orientation and her politics -- EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY * author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi *
Wound is a poet's novel, structured like "a pebble dropped into water" . . . a primer on feminist thought for readers with Pushkin in their veins * European Review of Books *
From very personal experiences, Vasyakina has written a frank text about memory, her own sexuality, the relationship between mother and daughter * Forbes Russia *
Wound is a story about how wounds can heal. To do this, they need to grope, understand and speak. This is not just an amazing novel, extremely frank, extremely accurate and extremely addictive, but, perhaps, a book about finding happiness * The Blueprint *
This book is impossible to swallow or read in one gulp. I, who always read very quickly, only needed twenty pages. Then I had to step back, catch my breath, look at the surrounding objects, return to the familiar world - which, it seemed, would never be the same again. There is such density, concentration of thoughts and feelings in the text, that one wants to live and realize each fragment separately * Snob *
It is the rare and therefore especially valuable ability to see the forest, while distinguishing individual trees in it, and to generalize without falling into the sin of superficial simplification, which makes Oksana Vasyakina's Wound one of the most important texts published in Russian in 2021 * Meduza *

Author Bio

Oksana Vasyakina is a poet, activist and novelist. She was born in 1989 to a working-class family in the Siberian city of Ust-Ilimsk, Russia. In 2019 she was awarded the Lyceum Prize for her poetry, which appears in English translation in n+1, in the collection This Is Us Losing Count and in PEN America's Verses on the Vanguard: Russian Poetry Today. Her autofictional debut novel, Wound, won the prestigious NOS literary prize in 2021, and was additionally chosen as the Critics' Academy Choice.