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    The Dream Life of Sukhanov

    Author Olga Grushin
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    Paperback
    $22.00 US
    Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
    On sale Jan 30, 2007 | 368 Pages | 9780143038405
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    Olga Grushin’s astonishing literary debut has won her comparisons with everyone from Gogol to Nabokov. A virtuoso study in betrayal and its consequences, it explores—really, colonizes—the consciousness of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground artist for the perks of a Soviet apparatchik. But, at the age of 56, his perfect life is suddenly disintegrating. Buried dreams return to haunt him. New political alignments threaten to undo him. Vaulting effortlessly from the real to the surreal and from privilege to paranoia, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a darkly funny, demonically entertaining novel.
    • WINNER
      New York Public Library's Young Lion Fiction Award
    © Libor Fojtik

    Olga Grushin was born in Moscow and moved to the United States at eighteen. She is the author of three previous novels, Forty Rooms, The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov. Her debut, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, earned her a place on Granta’s once-a-decade Best Young American Novelists list, and was one of The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year. Both it and The Line were among The Washington Post’s Ten Best Books of the Year, and Forty Rooms was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Grushin writes in English, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives outside Washington, DC, with her two children.

    View titles by Olga Grushin
    Ironic, surreal, sometimes stunning and always chaotic . . . Gogolesque in its sardonic humor. (The New York Times)

    The Dream Life of Sukhanov will tower over the majority of what publishers put out this year. (New York)

    Steeped in the tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov, and Nabokov, Grushin is clearly a writer of large and original talent. (James Lasdun)

    Grushin has imagined both Sukhanov’s carefully managed life and his richly troubling personal history with a detailed intensity that fruitfully echoes Solzhenitsyn’s best books, Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

    The next big thing in American literary fiction . . . so accomplished are her skills—so hauntingly assured—that more than one US critic has greeted her as the next great American novelist. (Financial Times)

    Harks back to the great Russian masters [and] breathes new life into American literary fiction. (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World)

    About

    Olga Grushin’s astonishing literary debut has won her comparisons with everyone from Gogol to Nabokov. A virtuoso study in betrayal and its consequences, it explores—really, colonizes—the consciousness of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground artist for the perks of a Soviet apparatchik. But, at the age of 56, his perfect life is suddenly disintegrating. Buried dreams return to haunt him. New political alignments threaten to undo him. Vaulting effortlessly from the real to the surreal and from privilege to paranoia, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a darkly funny, demonically entertaining novel.

    Awards

    • WINNER
      New York Public Library's Young Lion Fiction Award

    Author

    © Libor Fojtik

    Olga Grushin was born in Moscow and moved to the United States at eighteen. She is the author of three previous novels, Forty Rooms, The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov. Her debut, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, earned her a place on Granta’s once-a-decade Best Young American Novelists list, and was one of The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year. Both it and The Line were among The Washington Post’s Ten Best Books of the Year, and Forty Rooms was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Grushin writes in English, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives outside Washington, DC, with her two children.

    View titles by Olga Grushin

    Praise

    Ironic, surreal, sometimes stunning and always chaotic . . . Gogolesque in its sardonic humor. (The New York Times)

    The Dream Life of Sukhanov will tower over the majority of what publishers put out this year. (New York)

    Steeped in the tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov, and Nabokov, Grushin is clearly a writer of large and original talent. (James Lasdun)

    Grushin has imagined both Sukhanov’s carefully managed life and his richly troubling personal history with a detailed intensity that fruitfully echoes Solzhenitsyn’s best books, Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

    The next big thing in American literary fiction . . . so accomplished are her skills—so hauntingly assured—that more than one US critic has greeted her as the next great American novelist. (Financial Times)

    Harks back to the great Russian masters [and] breathes new life into American literary fiction. (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World)

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