Glas: 26 books

A philandering husband’s guilty conscience after his latest love affair prompts him to take his wife and children to Paris in a final attempt to save his marriage. A precocious teenager with a passion for theatre discoveries a mysterious book in a second-hand bookshop and makes it his mission to...

William Wyrd, an introverted history professor at long remove from his youthful days as a Marine sniper, is drafted to serve overseas in the U.S. military at age thirty-nine. Already in a relationship made tenuous by the demands of dual professional careers and their own dearth of interpersonal experience,...

The Grassy Street chronicles ordinary life in a typical Soviet suburb in the 1940s. Unsavory staff by any standard, but fascinating for the picture Eppel paints — with his remarkable tenderness, humor and even ebullience. Eppel is a past master of the subtle detail and the bon mot. His minute descriptions of everyday life make you either burst out laughing or dissolve in tears

Snow Germans is a highly topical metaphysical novel about young people growing up trapped between two of Europe’s giants: Germany and Russia. It captures a disappearing world, that of Germans once encouraged to settle in the Russian countryside in the times of Peter the Great, whose identity and...

Larissa Miller's memoir recounts her childhood in postwar Moscow, with reminiscences of her mother, a major journalist under Stalin, and of her father killed in World War II; the discovery of her Jewish identity; her first love; and reflections on the nature of literature and art. Her life has been...

The turbulent life of a great poet against the flamboyant background of Bohemian Moscow in the 1920s. This is the story of an extraordinary friendship and an extraordinary poet seen through the prism of an extraordinary time and place the upside-down world of Moscow just after the Revolution. By the...

In a city where it always rains some people have names while others have only numbers. By means of plastic surgery all are made alike, both outwardly and inwardly. The Face-maker and the Muse is an anti-utopian musing on a society where work is a giant machinery mutilating human beings, where everybody...

Real humour is always black, says Valery Ronshin, a highly imaginative and prolific writer whose work includes a strong element of mysticism. His fresh and distinctive literary style recalls that of the 20th century Russian writers of the absurd such as Daniil Kharms. Ronshin's reality is necessarily...

In this striking novel from a bold new Russian talent, a group of gangsters seizing control of a little town with the collusion of the corrupt local authorities, businessmen and police becomes a miniature portrayal of Russia as a whole. Defending his daughter, the protagonist Savely accidentally shoots...

Two novellas showcasing the best of new Russian writing. Two short novels from Russia, both painting a vivid portrait of life for the new generation: of young people in their late teens and early 20s stung by their first contact with harsh reality. Mendeleev Rock by Andrei Kuzechkin takes place in...

These Oriental fables by Russian great Vlas Doroshevich are unexpected, exciting, colourful and tremendously readable. Doroshevich could not stand tyranny in any form and used his tales to mock and accuse the rich and the powerful for their wickedness, hypocrisy and stupidity. The themes within will...

Alexander Pokrovsky’s cycle of satirical stories about the trials and trivialities of life on a nuclear submarine are both funny and frightening. Based on the author’s 15 years as an officer in the navy, they convince you of the sorry state of these underwater vessels that sometimes turn into common graves.