Eastbound
Maylis de Kerangal
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars
3.83
· 6 ratings · 135 pages · Published: 01 Jan 2006
Perfect for fans of Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Eastbound is both an adventure story and a duet of two vibrant inner worlds.
In mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world.
Racing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Hélène, for whom he feels an uncanny trust.
A complicity quickly grows between the two when he manages to urgently ask—through a pantomime and basic Russian that Hélène must decipher—for her help to hide him. They hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Hélène’s first-class sleeping car. Aliocha now a hunted deserter and Hélène his accomplice with her own inner landscape of recent memories to contend with.
Tagged as:
- on the move 3
- magical realism 3
- psychological 2
- literary fiction 2
- female mc 1
- contemporary 1
- crime 1
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- format - reader age
- anthology 2
- adult fiction 1