PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Oleg Pavlov is one of the most highly-regarded contemporary Russian writers. He has won the Russian Booker Prize (2002) and the Solzhenitsyn Prize (2012) among many other awards. Born in Moscow in 1970, Pavlov spent his military service as a prison guard in Kazakhstan. Many of the incidents portrayed in his fiction draw on his experiences there. He recalls reading about Karabas, the camp he had worked at, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, then became Solzhenitsyn's assistant and was inspired to continue the great writer's work. Pavlov writes in the tradition of great Russian novelists such as Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.
'Russian Booker Prize winner Pavlov (Captain of the Steppe) plunges readers into the grim realities of Soviet military life in the early 1980s ... Bromfield, well-known for his translations of contemporary Russian literature, ably renders Pavlov's prose with extremes of lyricism and banality. Pavlov pulls off a harrowing tale about institutional cruelty and the perversions of character that it produces.' Publishers Weekly -------- 'Written in a bare, stilted style, it never plays for the high drama - choosing instead to beat steadily on from one absurdity to the next, coolly piling horror on top of horror - Seen through a lens softened by exhaustion and cheap vodka, Pavlov's dark picture of existence becomes wryly amusing and often almost whimsical in its black humour.' Ross McIndoe, The Skinny -------- 'Images of violence and pain linger with the reader long after the book is finished. Not for the faint hearted.' Scarlett MccGwire, Tribune --------
