The Russian-Speaker

A novel of Tashkent, Petersburg, Moscow — 1985–2010

Biographical memoir-fiction based on the life of Ruslan — a friend of the writer (FrankX) — born 1985 in Yunusabad, Tashkent, who grew up through Perestroika and the collapse, was exiled to St. Petersburg and Moscow as a teenager after the 1999 Tashkent bombings, and returned to Uzbekistan to work a hotel lobby, then the Chirchiq Transformer Plant, then the US Embassy of a country that watched him from the day he was born. A novel of categorical homelessness — not Russian enough for Russia, not Uzbek enough for Uzbekistan, fluent in both and at home in neither. Comp shelf: Bezmozgis, Krasikov, Hemon, Ismailov, Matar, Alexievich.