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In this gripping tale, a Russian conscript and a French woman cross paths on the Trans-Siberian railroad, each fleeing to the east for their own reasons. Perfect for fans of Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.
Eastbound is both an adventure story and a duet of two vibrant inner worlds.
In mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world.
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.
"Impeccable ... De Kerangal's triumphant achievement is powered by mellifluous prose with a rhythm as steady as the train. Readers are in for a dazzling literary ride." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In this slim, sleek tale that hurries along at the speeding train's clip, de Kerangal draws on classic train capers while also poetically, ravishingly conveying the immensity and harsh beauty of this haunted land of exile and torment ... With each new novel, de Kerangal secures her place as a writer of stunning, incisive, enrapturing fiction; it's a boon to have this sensuous, soulful, and suspenseful earlier work so gorgeously translated into English by Jessica Moore." - Booklist
"In this timely novella about a Russian military conscript defecting from the army, 20-year-old Aliocha is on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok, spanning almost a quarter of the Earth's circumference ... A balance of internal thought and external action propelled by a narrative that races on in long sentences, keeping things flowing beautifully in between moments of drama." - The Guardian
"Eastbound is a compassionate thriller, one where suspense is created around the question of whether one person will aid another. It asks us to remember our humanity and the humanity of others. something which goes beyond nationality and language." -
Grant Rintoul, First Reading
This information about Eastbound was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo Credit: (c) Emmanuelle Marchadour
Maylis de Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including Naissance d'un pont (Birth of a Bridge), winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and the winner of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Mend the Living was Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2016.
Name Pronunciation
Maylis De Kerangal: my-LEECE dee CARE-en-gal (second part of the first name rhymes with "fleece")
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