An exciting, heartbreaking, and exhilarating read

Mikhail Shishkin is a multi-award-winning contemporary Russian author, and this, his fourth novel, has already been hailed as a prodigious literary achievement.

Volodenka is a soldier at war in northern China at the turn of the 20th century. His lifeline is a woman called Sasha, with one brown eye and one green, who lives in Russia in the near-present.

Ostensibly, the novel takes the form of correspondence between the two, as with Aidan Higgins’ Bornholm Night-Ferry, although in this case, actual meetings are absent, the letters interlinking only through the subtlety of shared imagery and allusions.