London, United Kingdom, July 29, 2020 --(PR.com)-- Summary: The late 1920s... Convicted of murdering his father, Artiom Goriainov is serving a sentence of several years on the Solovki Archipelago. Artiom is a strong young man who survives all facets of the hell that is the Soviet camps: hunger, cold, betrayal, the death of friends, a failed escape attempt and a love affair. Unlike the many political prisoners at Solovki, he has no strong convictions. He is an everyman who, like the Virgil of Solovki, simply narrates what is happening in front of his eyes. His only motivation is to survive.

Founded in the 15th century on an archipelago in the White Sea, from 1923 the monastery became a “camp of special designation,” the foundation stone of the Soviet GULAG system. The novel describes a period when Solovki was being converted from a re-education camp for “socially damaging elements” into what eventually became a mass labor camp. The notion of a Utopia for “forging new human beings,” complete with a library, athletic events, and research laboratories, eventually mutated into a hell of despotism and brutality.

About the Author:

Zakhar Prilepin was born near Ryazan in 1975. He led an unsettled life before dedicating himself to writing, spending time as a student, a laborer, a journalist and as a soldier, serving with the Special Forces in Chechnya. Prilepin has come to the public attention not only as one of the best writers of his generation, but as a committed, and often controversial, political activist on behalf of the "Other Russia" coalition. While living in Nizhny Novgorod, he was the regional editor of independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). He took part in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, but left the territory of the DPR in July 2018. He has since then been residing in Russia.

Prilepin’s combination of lucid prose and social consciousness has made him one of the most popular and acclaimed writers in Russia today, drawing comparisons with the Russian classics. His novel Sankya, which draws on his own experiences to depict life among young political extremists, was shortlisted for the Russian Booker in 2007, when it also won the Yasnaya Polyana Award and the Best Foreign Novel of the Year Award in China. His novel The Monastery is winner of the Book of the Year Award in 2014, a winner of the Book Runet-2014 Award, and winner of the Big Book Prize in 2014. Prilepin’s Sankya and Sin are both available from Glagoslav Publications.

Title: The Monastery
Author: Zakhar Prilepin
Translator: Nicholas Kotar
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications
Language: English
ISBN: 9781912894789, 9781912894796, 9781912894802
Extent: 660 pages
Format: paperback, hardback, e-book

Review copies are available upon request.