★Awards: Longlisted for Prix Medicis Etranger 2014, France Winner of Russian Literary Prize 2008!
★Rights sold: Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Serbia, Finland, Spain, Poland, Romania, China!
★Like Saramago’s the Stone Rash , young prize-winning author Vladimir Lorchenkov addresses both global issues of the human condition and topical matters of modern European politics in his horrific, surrealistic novel.

　　This is the phantasmagorical story of dwellers in the small village of Larga, Moldova, neighbouring on Italy. True to Leo Tolstoy’s idea that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” every Largavite has his/her own pitiful story, and all of them dream of going to prosperous Italy as a solution to their wretched existence. Italy, the land of milk and honey, becomes their ultimate goal and obsession, and the dwellers of Larga will stop at nothing to reach the living paradise.

　　At first they sell all their property to pay 4000 Euros a head to swindlers, who, after several days of “traveling,” dump the Largavites on the outskirts of Moldova’s capital city. Having failed to reach their destination by a direct route, the Largavites design an aircraft out of an old tractor – which gets shot up by stray fi reworks on a national holiday. They then transform the remains into a submarine, only to have it sink by a frontier post. They master the sport of curling (to take part in an international competition); and, eventually, set off on a crusade, which at last arouses the general concern of the EU.

　　Loss, shattered hopes, and broken lives become the price the dwellers pay to realize an old truth – we all bear a personal paradise and hell within us.

　　Bitter, painfully sardonic and insightful, Milk and Honey takes on a deeply tragic note, as it sharply articulates universal assumptions that reveal themselves in a subversive perspective.

Vladimir Lorchenkov

　　Vladimir Lorchenkov was born in 1979. A journalist and and prose writer, he was shortlisted and won numerous literary prizes, including Debut Literary Prize and the Russian Literary Prize (for fiction written in Russian by authors living outside Russia). Vladimir Lorchenkov is the author of fourteen published books. Lorchenkov recently moved with his family to Canada.
Prizes:
　　Longlisted for Prix Medicis Etranger 2014!
　　Shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize 2012!
　　Winner of Russian Literary Prize 2008!
　　Winner of Debut Literary Prize!