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 makes 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 the train station has little revelation to offer her yearning heart. As he drives her across desolate landscapes in his freight truck, 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 and depravity of the post-Soviet 1990s. Always humming in the background, the austere beauty and mercurial nature of the steppe reminds her of the contradictions at the heart of their relationship—both natural and forced, intimate and alienated.

Oksana Vasyakina’s second novel pierces the surface of human relations and reaches into the depths of shame, longing, and grief that lie beneath. In simple, precise prose, she paints a vivid portrait of estrangement and situates it in the broader context of her country’s attempts to reckon with its troubled history.

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“Short but haunting . . . [Steppe] is part of a trilogy investigating the deaths of members of Vasyakina’s family. But it is also a portrait of a certain class of Russians, and by extension the history of Russia itself . . . [An] intensely observant book.” —Andrew Holleran, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide

“An elegiac tribute to a fatally flawed bond.” —Kirkus Reviews

“In this compassionate and clear-eyed character study, Vasyakina traces the bond between a rough-hewn Siberian truck driver and his queer daughter . . . Vasyakina assembles a thoughtful and necessarily incomplete portrait of the father from the narrator’s musings on the harshness and violence of the post-Soviet era that shaped him. It’s a satisfying examination of how well a father and daughter can know one another.” —Publishers Weekly

“A family history, a road trip through contemporary Russia, Steppe is as unflinching and capacious as the landscape from which it takes its name. Vasyakina is a rare truthsayer, a voice of her generation. I loved this.” —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of Ghost Pains

“This is a gorgeously recursive book about daughters and fathers, about the unknowability. pain, and occasional tragedy of being fathered in the early twenty-first century, and the way we come to understand our own childhoods only as adults, when it’s all too late. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like Steppe, and at times when I was reading it felt so real and heartbreaking I could hardly stand it.” —Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest

“In Vasyakina’s prose, grief and isolation become luminous. When reading this dissociative and brilliant novel, one is reminded that to have a father is to inherit a fractured nation.” —Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive

Steppe

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By Oksana VasyakinaTranslated by Elina Alter