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A breathtaking novel of grief, love, creativity and a young woman’s queer and artistic awakening.
In the days after her mother’s death from breast cancer, Oksana, a young queer poet, decides to return her mother’s ashes to their working-class hometown in Siberia. It is a journey home that will take her through the raw, almost dreamlike emotions of early grief through to an acceptance of the wound that death leaves behind.
As she navigates the rituals of parting, Oksana feels her way through memory and heartache with a wry humour, reflecting on her complex relationship with her mother and on her own experiences of love, loss, sexuality and the search for home.
Powerful, lyrical and precise, this extraordinary debut is a novel which blurs the line between reality and creation. Wound is a both an exploration of grief and a journey towards love, happiness and creative fulfilment.
Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter
“This is not just an amazing novel, extremely frank, extremely accurate and extremely addictive, but, perhaps, a book about finding happiness” The Blueprint
“Wound is a poet’s novel . . . a primer on feminist thought for readers with Pushkin in their veins” European Review of Books
In the days after her mother’s death from breast cancer, Oksana, a young queer poet, decides to return her mother’s ashes to their working-class hometown in Siberia. It is a journey home that will take her through the raw, almost dreamlike emotions of early grief through to an acceptance of the wound that death leaves behind.
As she navigates the rituals of parting, Oksana feels her way through memory and heartache with a wry humour, reflecting on her complex relationship with her mother and on her own experiences of love, loss, sexuality and the search for home.
Powerful, lyrical and precise, this extraordinary debut is a novel which blurs the line between reality and creation. Wound is a both an exploration of grief and a journey towards love, happiness and creative fulfilment.
Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter
“This is not just an amazing novel, extremely frank, extremely accurate and extremely addictive, but, perhaps, a book about finding happiness” The Blueprint
“Wound is a poet’s novel . . . a primer on feminist thought for readers with Pushkin in their veins” European Review of Books
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Reviews
Wound is a poet's novel, structured like "a pebble dropped into water" . . . a primer on feminist thought for readers with Pushkin in their veins
From very personal experiences, Vasyakina has written a frank text about memory, her own sexuality, the relationship between mother and daughter
This book is impossible to swallow or read in one gulp. I, who always read very quickly, only needed twenty pages. Then I had to step back, catch my breath, look at the surrounding objects, return to the familiar world - which, it seemed, would never be the same again. There is such density, concentration of thoughts and feelings in the text, that one wants to live and realize each fragment separately
It is heartening to see public recognition of Vasyakina, a feminist activist and a lesbian, whose work does not hide but rather publicizes her orientation and her politics
It is the rare and therefore especially valuable ability to see the forest, while distinguishing individual trees in it, and to generalize without falling into the sin of superficial simplification, which makes Oksana Vasyakina's Wound one of the most important texts published in Russian in 2021
Wound is a story about how wounds can heal. To do this, they need to grope, understand and speak. This is not just an amazing novel, extremely frank, extremely accurate and extremely addictive, but, perhaps, a book about finding happiness