The Wake

A new, eagerly awaited novel by the winner of the «Big Book» and «Yasnaya Polyana» awards.

A chronicle of several generations of a single Siberian family. Childhood in Soviet Tuva, the arrival of young specialists to these places, a shift in attitudes toward Russians in the 1990s, a forced departure from the city back to the village near Minusinsk—and life “from the garden.” The parents’ unfulfilled dreams—mom’s acting aspirations and dad’s writerly ambitions—are woven into the fabric of the story and become one of its central themes. The author has touched on this before in his books, but never spoke about it so directly.

Roman Senchin (born 1971) is a prose writer, winner of the «Big Book» and «Yasnaya Polyana» awards. Author of the novels «Yeltyshevy», «The Flooding Zone», «Rain in Paris», and the short-story collections «The Noughties», «The Nineties», «Detonation», as well as the biography of Alexander Tinkov in the «ЖИЛ» series.

The novel’s hero—or, as Roman Senchin himself calls it, the book-essay—«Pomинки» arrives at his parents’ house after his mother’s death. He takes up managing the household: brings the little hut back to order, repairs the fence, gathers the victoria he once planted with his parents, goes fishing in places familiar since his youth—and again and again returns to memory… About his own childhood and the younger sister who has died, about his young parents and their ancestors who came to Siberia at the beginning of the 20th century, about moving to Moscow and the returns, about marriages and separations, about plots that have already appeared in his books, and about what still remains to be written…