Pavel Zhang and Other River Creatures

Pavel Zhang is a talented programmer at a large Chinese company in Moscow. A former orphanage kid, he stubbornly works toward his goal: to move from Russia, which is rapidly being colonized, into the metropolis—China—and he feels no guilt, even when he learns that his new project will form the foundation of the future state chipization of people.

But one day, during a volunteer trip to an orphanage, Zhang meets a man who broke his life many years ago… “Pavel Zhang and Other River Creatures” is a novel about trauma and its consequences, about moral choice, about justice—and the relativity of that concept; about Chinese and Slavic mythical monsters—and about real monsters made of flesh and blood.

“Digital camps—brilliantly depicted in Vera Bogdanova’s dystopia—seem to many like the nearest future. But will it happen? The transformation of a careerist into a hero of the Resistance, tragic and convincing, raises the novel to a high level of literature—and gives the reader hope.” (Olga Slavnikova)