ABOUT
THE BOOK

From the author of the international bestseller, Laurus, comes a richly layered coming-of-age story in which a musical prodigy, robbed of his talent by an incurable disease, attempts to overcome his mortality. Through well-wrought vignettes and dialogue in the original Ukrainian, Vodolazkin shows the ways in which these identities are inextricably linked and expressed through the push and pull of loyalties big and small. After Gleb Yanovsky, a celebrated guitarist, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he permits a writer, Sergei Nesterov, to pen his biography. In a mischievous and tender account, Gleb recalls a personal story of a lifetime quest for meaning, and how the burden of success changes with age. Expanding the literary universe spun in his earlier novels, Vodolazkin explores music and fame, heritage and belonging, time and memory. In a dueling interplay between Gleb’s first-person recollections and Nesterov’s interpretation, the carefully knit stitches unravel into a puzzle: Whose story is it: the subject’s or the writer’s? Are art and love really no match for death? Is memory a reliable narrator? In Brisbane, the city of our dreams, as in music, Gleb hopes he has found a path to eternity and a way to stop the clock.