With the upcoming Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winner announcement, we thought it ample opportunity to draw your attention to other books in translation.
When we talk about 'State-of-the-nation' novels, we tend to mean books that are British or American, approximately the size of breezeblocks and terribly, terribly Serious – like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or George Eliot's Middlemarch. What we tend to forget is that the Russians have been doing this for ever, and usually better - and far more entertainingly - than us Anglophones.
Here is the Booktrust's list of 5 great State-of-Russia novels
Five books about Russia
With the upcoming Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winner announcement, we thought it ample opportunity to draw your attention to other books in translation.
When we talk about 'State-of-the-nation' novels, we tend to mean books that are British or American, approximately the size of breezeblocks and terribly, terribly Serious – like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or George Eliot's Middlemarch. What we tend to forget is that the Russians have been doing this for ever, and usually better - and far more entertainingly - than us Anglophones.
Here is the Booktrust's list of 5 great State-of-Russia novels
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Petersburg
Penguin ClassicsA dizzy, impressionistic and occasionally downright demented portrait of a city on the edge of revolution, Petersburg takes its place among the great city-novels like Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz. -
Dead Souls
PenguinThe mummy and daddy of all Russian social novels, Gogol's masterpiece is equals parts rambling picaresque, Dickensian social tapestry, absurdist farce and caustic satire. -
Life and Fate
VintageGrossman's epic panorama of the Second World War, the Holocaust and Stalin's postwar campaign of antisemitism is uncompromising in its realism and often harrowing in its depiction of the brutalities of battle and genocide. -
Omon Ra
FaberThis slim book, mournfully consigns the Soviet Union to history's dustbin in a riot of paranoid psychedelia, wild satire and mordant wit. -
Cancer Ward
VintageFrom the restricted environment of a hospital ward and an intensely personal portrait of disease, Solzhenitsyn spins a subtle, profound and intensely moving portrait of a pathological society and the suffering humanity that inhabits it.
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