olgagrushin.com - The Dream Life of Sukhanov

The Dream Life of Sukhanov

Winner, 2007 Young Lions Fiction Award

Shortlist, 2006 Orange Award for New Writers

Finalist, 2006 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

Longlist, 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Top 10 Best Books of 2006, Washington Post Book World

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Poets & Writers Magazine Best First Fiction

Borders Original Voices Selection

Semi-finalist, VCU First Novelist Award

Finalist, Best Books 2005, USA Book News

Best Book of 2006, Library Journal

Best Debut of the Year, The Moscow Times

Jonathan Yardley's pick of the year, The Washington Post

Pick of the Year, Financial Times

Book of the Year, The Globe and Mail

Boyd Tonkin's Best World Fiction for Christmas, The Independent

Page-Turner of the Year, Washingtonian

"It was my pleasure to discover an uncommonly accomplished first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, by Olga Grushin, a young writer who was born in the Soviet Union but now lives here in Washington. In English more fluent and graceful than that written by many well-known American writers, she tells the story of a Soviet cultural bureaucrat who dances along a fine line between capitulation to the inflexible demands of the communist system and his own artistic beliefs and longings. She sees him as clearly as Jason Sokol sees his conflicted white Southerners, and her sympathy for his dilemma is matched by her withering account of his willingness to let a taste for luxury and position override his convictions."

Jonathan Yardley, A Critic's Pick of the Year's Best Books

"Olga Grushin's hallucinatory tale of a member of the Soviet privilegentsia discovering the price of his pact with the devil boldly collapses past into present, dream into reality, bitterness into sweetness, rising to heights of artful virtuosity rare in any book, let alone a first novel. Steeped in the tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov, and Nabokov, Grushin is clearly a writer of large and original talent."

James Lasdun, author of The Horned Man

About the Novel

At fifty-six, Anatoly Sukhanov has everything a man could want. Nearly twenty-five years ago, he traded his precarious existence as a brilliant underground artist for the perks and comforts of a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik. Once he created art; now he censors it.

But a series of increasingly bizarre events transforms Sukhanov's perfect world into a nightmare. Buried dreams return to haunt him, long-repressed figures from his past surface to torment him, new political alignments threaten to undo him, and his once loving family and loyal comrades grow distant. As he stumbles through the dark corridors of memory, his life begins to unravel, and he finds himself losing everything he sold his soul to gain.

Olga Grushin tells the story of Sukhanov's betrayal of his talent, his friends, and his principles in dream sequences that may be real and in real time that may be nightmare, effortlessly shifting the borders between the two. Her masterly play with voice, time, and reality makes this often surreal exploration of self-dissolution and faithlessness an extraordinary reading experience. And her subtle transformation of Sukhanov from an arrogant and self-absorbed member of the ruling class to a terrified beggar in his own private hell is nothing short of miraculous. The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a virtuoso performance, original, startling, haunting.

Foreign Rights

UK (Viking)