Steppe (A Novel)

A visceral, stirring novel following a queer literature student traveling across Russia with her estranged father, a long haul truck driver secretly dying of AIDS, from the acclaimed author of Wound

A decade after her father walks out on her family, the narrator of Steppe, now a literature student, goes on the road with him as he drives deliveries across the vast plains of Russia. She’s both drawn to and repulsed by his rugged life as a trucker, eager to understand the person who made her.

But the prematurely aged, embittered man secretly being consumed by AIDS who meets her at a train station has little revelation to offer her yearning heart. As they travel through desolate landscapes and provincial towns, the narrator tugs on the few threads that make him her family, and reflects on her father’s small role in Russia’s violent patriarchal structure and the chaos of the post-Soviet 1990s. Always humming in the background, the steppe’s austere beauty and mercurial nature remind  her of the contradictions at the heart of their relationship—both natural and forced, intimate and alienated.

“Epic and infinitesimal” (The Whitney Review) in scale, Oksana Vasyakina’s second novel offers “a clarifying portrait of . . . Russian life, cycles of violence, and the ways that ideological training can seamlessly shift into behavior more suited for a criminal underworld” (Words Without Borders). As the steppe’s “scarred body makes history legible” (Full Stop), Steppe becomes “a poetic illumination of those who don’t stop being and those who don’t stop mattering, an ode to the harsh beauty of its titular landscape” (Asymptote).