The Lady of the Mine

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents The Lady of the Mine by Sergei Lebedev, read by Greg Kolpakchi.

The extraordinary new novel by the author of Untraceable.

A sealed shaft in a Donbas coal mine contains unimaginable horror: layer upon layer of human bodies, the victims of Red and White terror during the Revolution, of Stalin’s purges, of the Einsatzgruppen in the Holocaust.

Around this infamous pit, in a polluted region convulsed once again by war and cruelty when Russia invades Ukraine, the fates of four characters intertwine: a mysterious and powerful laundress whose dedication to cleaning the filth created by the mine attracts the suspicion of the secret police; her innocent daughter Zhanna, left alone by her mother’s death; a brutal Russian militia man, who targets Zhanna; and his boss, a former KGB man turned ruthless servant of Putin. The voice of The Engineer, a murdered Jew who designed and constructed the mine, is a witness to the bloody history of the region and the terrible secret at its heart.

A haunting, lyrical meditation on the legacy of dictatorship and atrocity.

Critics Review

Set in Ukraine in 2014, Sergei Lebedev’s novel explores continuities of state control and suppression . . . writing both critically and imaginatively about the ongoing here and now . . . Lebedev is a trained geologist, and this is not his first novel to explore continuous human experiences and history with evocations of a grounded place that discloses layered depths.
Financial Times
A monumental feat. Lebedev mines the blackest seams of the Soviet Union's past and Russian's more recent to conjure up a book of rare elemental power that lays bare the dark forces driving Putin's Russia today. There is no braver and more important writer of his generation.
Catherine Belton, author of Putin's People
Lebedev's new novel is magnificent, a haunted, disturbing book. In Eastern Ukraine, an old mine holds thick sediments of human bones and souls, but there has been no reckoning, no trial of those who killed. You cannot read this cry for justice without wishing that the dead might finally speak – and that they might be heard.
Catherine Merridale, author of Lenin on the Train
Sergei Lebedev’s new novel offers his most haunting exploration yet of how guilt wreaks moral havoc across generations. Set in Donbas of the 2010s, it is his first work to tackle Russia’s war on Ukraine directly. Like all his novels, though, it links past and present together into a chain of catastrophes... The Lady of the Mine vividly weaves together the voices of victims and perpetrators of Soviet terror, the Holocaust and twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars. Its urgent appeal for responsibility and repentance could not be more timely amidst the ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Professor Polly Jones, author of Gulag Fiction
The Lady of the Mine in Antonina W. Bouis’s magnificent English translation highlights Russia’s efforts to sow division within the Donbas in 2014, delving into the region’s legacy of atrocities via an abandoned mine shaft . . . Lebedev is a trained geologist, and his novels are full of traces of history recorded in the earth.
Los Angeles Review of Books
In Sergei Lebedev’s harrowing novel The Lady of the Mine, murdered souls buried in an abandoned Ukrainian coal mine haunt the country’s emerging conflict with Russia . . . With poetic intensity and unflinching imagery . . . reveals obscured atrocities while creating hellish landscapes of the past and present.
Foreword Reviews
A sto­ry full of both strik­ing beau­ty and unset­tling violence . . . Explore[s] what can­not be buried, compressed, or con­tained in rock, and what can­not be scrubbed away by human hands.
Jewish Book Council
[Lebedev] shows himself a master craftsman of words and sentences, and his translator Antonina W. Bouis matches him every step of the way in English… He has long been compared to Solzhenitsyn, and he has continued the older writer’s work of exhuming Soviet crimes.
On the Seawall

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