Sergei Lebedev: Год кометы (The Year of the Comet)

The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Год кометы (The Year of the Comet). Our unnamed hero is born in the later days of the Soviet Union and the book is essentially about what it was like during that period. The first part looks more backwards, particularly as his grandmothers dote on him as they lost so many relatives in the war and we see him struggling to find out what is the nature of the Soviet Union, what he is not being told and something about his deceased forebears. In the second part,we see that things are not going well. Initially he and the family are somewhat protected in their rural dacha, even as our hero sets out to catch he mysterious serial child killer known as Mister but, when they move back to Moscow, we watch the Soviet Union gradually fall apart. I found the first part most interesting but, overall, it is fascinating account of the last days of the Soviet Union seen from the perspective of an ordinary person.

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