Maylis de Kerangal

Translated from the French by Jessica Moore

Published: 29 September 2022

FINALIST FOR THE FRENCH-AMERICAN FOUNDATION TRANSLATION PRIZE 2024
NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2023. NEW YORKER BEST BOOKS of 2023
Financial Times and New Statesman’s Best Books of 2022
Reviewed in the Guardian, Irish Times, New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, World Literature Today among others

On the Trans-Siberian Railway a desperate Russian conscript hopes a chance encounter with an older French woman will offer him a line of flight.

‘Richly atmospheric and full of suspense, Eastbound combines a vibrant account of one of the most magical train journeys in the world, with a narrative of a double escape, depicting an unlikely alliance of a French woman trying to leave her lover by travelling in the wrong direction, and a heartbreakingly young Russian draft dodger. It takes a great writer to manage all that so convincingly in one hundred and twenty thrilling pages.’
– Vesna Goldsworthy, author of Iron Curtain

‘Wonderfully immersive prose, relentlessly propulsive as the movement of a train but rhythmically dipping into and out of her characters’ perspective, worldview, psychology.'
– Jonathan Gibbs, on twitter

‘As a choreographer knows, if you place a man and a woman on the stage even in an abstract ballet, you already have a story. As Maylis de Kerangal, one of the three or four best French novelists working today, reveals, the story need not be one of physical desire but of shared loneliness and the longing for escape—and of mammalian empathy’
— Edmund White

‘Eastbound is a novella told in a single breath, quick as a light turned on; intense, precise, unconditional, potent. Jessica Moore’s translation is masterful.’
— Anne Michaels

Published in France one year after Kerangal’s award-winning novel Birth of a Bridge, Eastbound breathes new life into the Russian literary archetype of the rebel soldier and revives the reality of disempowerment of the Soldiers’ Mothers of Saint Petersburg protest. Inspired by her observations on the ground as she travelled on the Trans-Siberian from Novossibirsk to Vladivostok in 2010, the novella developed from a radio piece written for France Culture.

Paperback with lilac endpapers
180 x 120mm, 120 pages
ISBN 978-1-8384904-4-7

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NB: Due to sales restrictions and VAT regulations, this book ships overseas, except to countries of the EU and North America. This book is published in North America by Archipelago Books.