Ljudmila Evgenʹevna Ulickaja Livres

One of Russia’s most renowned literary figures and a Man Booker International Prize nominee, Ludmila Ulitskaya presents what may be her final novel. Jacob’s Ladder is a family saga spanning a century of recent Russian history—and represents the summation of the author’s career, devoted to sharing the absurd and tragic tales of twentieth-century life in her nation. Jumping between the diaries and letters of Jacob Ossetsky in Kiev in the early 1900s and the experiences of his granddaughter Nora in the theatrical world of Moscow in the 1970s and beyond, Jacob’s Ladder guides the reader through some of the most turbulent times in the history of Russia and Ukraine, and draws suggestive parallels between historical events of the early twentieth century and those of more recent memory. Spanning the seeming promise of the prerevolutionary years, to the dark Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day, Jacob’s Ladder is a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory. With a scale worthy of Tolstoy, it asks how much control any of us have over our lives—and how much is in fact determined by history, by chance, or indeed by the genes passed down by the generations that have preceded us into the world.

The novel tells the story of Daniel Stein, a Polish Jew who miraculously survives the Holocaust by working for the Gestapo as an interpreter. This charade allows him not only to save himself, but to help hundreds of others by sharing vital information with those in peril.

The central character in Ludmila Ulitskaya's celebrated novel The Kukotsky Enigma is a gynaecologist contending with Stalin's prohibition of abortions in 1936. But, in the tradition of Russia's great family novels, the story encompasses the history of two families and unfolds in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the ruins of ancient civilizations on the Black Sea.

Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez is an iconic figure in her Crimean village, the last remaining pure-blooded Greek in a family that has lived on that coast for centuries. Childless Medea is the touchstone of a large family, which gathers each spring and summer at her home. There are her nieces (sexy Nike and shy Masha), her nephew Georgii (who shares Medea’s devotion to the Crimea), and their friends. In this single summer, the languor of love will permeate the Crimean air, hearts will be broken, and old memories will float to consciousness, allowing us to experience not only the shifting currents of erotic attraction and competition, but also the dramatic saga of this family amid the forces of dislocation, war, and upheaval of twentieth-century Russian life.

The Big Green Tent is the kind of book for which the term Russian novel was invented. A sweeping saga, it tells the story of three school friends who meet in 1950s Moscow and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience.

A wry, moving and dark story about Russians adrift in New York by award- winning Ludmila Ultiskaya, hailed by Gary Shteyngart as 'one of the most important living writers'.

An intense and dramatic reimagining of a plague outbreak in 1930s Moscow invites parallels with our pandemic-stricken times.

A new collection of stories by the acclaimed Ludmila Ulitskaya, masterfully translated into English