Yuri Buida “The Gift of Speech” M.: AST, 2023

The events in Yuri Buida's novel are more mundane only at first glance. View the book from one angle and you see a coming-of-age novel, from another, a family saga, and from a third, a love story. Buida, with all his characteristic wry observation, tells the story of a young man's development: after finding his father, he first enters the world of the late Soviet Moscow elite, then plunges into the notorious 1990s, and emerges before the reader almost in the present day. Several rather strange and clearly unconventional behaviors of the characters constitute another facet of the book—a detective story—but it is also a story about a clan whose ties are crumbling, about the moral qualities of a person independent of their social status, and about true love. It is also a story about the events of our shared past that have shaped our shared present. Perhaps this is the most important aspect of the wise Buida's novel. 

"The era of the unavenged was beginning. The flow of time raged like speech searching for meaning, and my mother could easily have been lost in this flow, falling victim to a dark god whose existence many suspected."