Ten years after her parents' divorce, a daughter meets her truck driver father and travels with him through central Russia and the southern regions. "Steppe" is a new novel by Oksana Vasyakina, forming a duology with her debut "Wound." The first book is about a daughter's farewell to her deceased mother, while the second explores her relationship with her father.

Reflecting back to the truck's cabin speeding through the steppe, the protagonist contemplates men whose youth was in the 1980s and 1990s, and the illnesses from which many silently die. She ponders how time has left her father behind, exposed to the cold winds of the future, and about Russia, uncertain of how to deal with its own history. Oksana Vasyakina is an author and laureate of the "Lyceum" (2019) and "NOS" (2021) awards.

This is a deeply personal book, yet the personal is expressed in the language of epic, primal elements, and forces. Shame, AIDS, death, steppe. It is a book about the world often called post-Soviet, but it is seen without any romanticization or nostalgia, as a world of senseless cruelty and pain. Russian, eternal, masculine. It is a book about time that passes and does not let go, rejects you, yet lives within you, from which you are made. This is a tender and terrifying book—about a father, about love, about suffering, about Russia, and at some depth, it's all the same.

Yury Saprykin

The steppe is the seabed, but the water is gone, leaving salt and space. Tough red grass grows where another life once existed. What is the curse called, where closeness, even the attempt at closeness, is impossible? This book lacks air. Vasyakina writes of a space from which love is excluded—and it is monstrously recognizable.

Elena Kostyuchenko