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THE UNDERGROUND by HAMID ISMAILOV Translated from the Russian by Carol Ermakova
24 September 2015 £10.99 p/b 9781632060440 272pp
Named “one of the best Russian novels of the 21st Century”, The Underground is the unforgettable story of an abandoned mixed-race boy navigating the wondrous and terrifying city of Moscow before the Soviet Union’s collapse.
“One of the best Russian novels of the 21st century.” – Continent Magazine
"Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground." – Literary Review
"Ismailov belongs to the tradition of Russian satirical novelists, from Gogol to Bulgakov and Platonov." – The Independent
"A writer of immense poetic power." – The Guardian
LAUNCH EVENT AT WATERSTONES PICCADILLY, 22 SEPTEMBER AT 7 P.M.
ABOUT THE BOOK: “I am Moscow’s underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town.” So begins the story of Mbobo, the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this captivating novel by exiled Uzbek author and BBC journalist Hamid Ismailov. Born to a Siberian woman and an African athlete competing in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo must navigate the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the shaky terrain of the Soviet Union before its collapse.
With echoes of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Ismailov’s novel tackles head-on the problems of race and the relationship between the individual and society in a thoroughly modern context. While paying homage to great Russian authors of the past – Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, Nabokov, and Pushkin – Ismailov emerges as a master of a new kind of Russian writing that revels in the sordid reality and diversity of the country today.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS: Born in an ancient city in what is now Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist and poet who was forced to leave his home in Tashkent when his writing brought him to the attention of government officials. Under threat of arrest, he moved to London and joined the BBC World Service, where he is now Head of the Central Asian Service. In addition to journalism, Ismailov is a prolific writer of poetry and prose, and his books have been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, German, Turkish, English and other languages. His work is still banned in Uzbekistan. He is the author of many novels and books of poetry, including The Dead Lake (Pereine Press, 2014), which was nominated for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He has translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek, and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and several Western languages.
Carol Ermakova studied German and Russian language and literature and holds an MA in translation from Bath University. She first visited Russia in 1991. More recently, Ermakova spent two years in Moscow working as a teacher and translator. Carol currently lives in the North Pennines and works as a freelance translator.