Prussian Bride

Another triumph for Yuri Buida, this is the second of his books to be translated into English, and like his first - The Zero Train - it was shortlisted for the Russian equivalent of the Booker Prize. It has also won a prestigious Apollon Grigoriev award. Buida was born in 1954 in the Kaliningrad Region. This area was formerly East Prussia and had been resettled with Soviet citizens a few years before Buida's birth. The result was an alien place populated by displaced individuals: 'Germans had lived here. Then they were deported. A ten-twenty-thirty year layer of Russian life trembled on a seven-hundred-year foundation about which I knew nothing. So the child began to invent.' Over a number of years Buida wrote and invented details about the area, and this is the resulting collection of 31 tales. The book makes for a surreal experience: his characters include widows, whores, resurrected politicians, madmen, orphans and ghosts, and they exist together in a dream-like blend of fantasy and bitter memory. All the extremes of human emotions are exposed: murder, abuse, passion, debts of honour, devotion, compassion are all here. Appalling, haunting and uplifting, this book is unlike anything you have read before, and completely unforgettable (Kirkus UK)