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The mystical laundress at the center of this novel is obsessed with purity. Her task is formidable as she stands guard over a sealed shaft at a Ukrainian coal mine that hides terrible truths.
The bodies of dead Jews lying in its depths seem to attract still more present-day crimes. Acclaimed Russian author Sergei Lebedev portrays a ghostly realm riven by lust and fear just as the Kremlin invades the same part of Ukraine occupied by the Wehrmacht in World War II. Then corpses rain from the sky when a jetliner is shot down overhead, scattering luxury goods along with the mortal remains. Eerie coincidences and gruesome discoveries fill this riveting exploration of an uncanny place where the geography exudes violence, and where the sins of the past are never all that in the past. Lebedev, who has won international praise for his soul-searching prose and unflinching examination of history's evils, shines light on the fault line where Nazism met Soviet communism, evolving into the new fascism of today's Russia.
"In the transfixing latest from Russian writer Lebedev, the ghosts of wars past are exhumed in 2014 eastern Ukraine ... juxtaposes stark and horrifying present-day images, such as bodies falling from a passenger plane shot down by Russian forces, with lyrical impressions ... It's a bleak and electrifying tour de force." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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
"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
"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: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West
This information about The Lady of the Mine 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.
Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. His first novel, Oblivion, has been translated into many languages.
Name Pronunciation
Sergei Lebedev: SER-gay LEH-beh-dehv
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