★Awards: Double winner of Big Book, Award 2012 (third prize by the jury and readers), Shortlisted for the Russian, Booker Prize 2012, Shortlisted for the National, Bestseller 2012, Shortlisted for the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, Book of the Month by Moscow Book Store!
★Rights sold: UK, US, Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Hungary , Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Serbia, Arabic, Bulgaria, Czech, Albania, Croatia, Armenia, Greece, Slovenia!
★After the success of her debut novel The Surgeon (2005), which gained her the nomination for the National Bestseller Prize and enthusiastic critical acclaim, Marina Stepnova returns with a mesmerizing story of love, loss and human genius.

　　Marusia and Sergei Chaldonov are indeed blessed in their marriage. He, a respectable scientist with a bright academic career ahead, despite the revolutionary turmoil in Russia at dawn of the 20th century; she, a beautiful, kind, and intelligent wife. Their complete happiness is marred by one thing only: the couple is childless. After the fi rst years of disappointment and doubt, Marusia makes a deal with God, the terms of which she never reveals to her husband. And in 1918, when Marusia is 49 years old, a child is bestowed on the couple. This child is Lazarus Lindt: 18-yearold self-educated maverick, true genius and a peer of the troubled century.

　　Lazar, too, loves Marusia, and with a passion that is different from filial love. The off spring of a poor Jewish family of which nothing is known besides their name, the prodigy Lazarus Lindt becomes Sergei Chaldonov’s brightest pupil, his follower, and in no time outdoes his champion. An easy winner in all fields of science, Lazar fails to accomplish what he wants most. Marusia will never know about the true nature of Lazarus’s feelings not when he, already an acclaimed physicist and head of a promising line in nuclear physics, follows the Chaldonovs to Ansk during the evacuation and stays in the provincial town when Marusia decides against returning to Moscow after the war; not when the jouir and bon vivant refuses to introduce Marusia to any of his numerous lovers; not even when Lazarus takes his chances and articulates his feelings at Sergei Chaldonov’s anniversary. Marusia’s open-hearted and easy response – “I love you too”– leaves no hope for Lazarus.

　　Lindt gets love-struck for the second time in his life years after Marusia’s quiet and peaceful death. Galina – all peaches and cream, an exceptionally beautiful 18-year-old assistant at a Department of Chemistry in the Ansk Engineering Institute of Water Supply – plans her happy and simple family life with a postgraduate student, when her future knocks on the door of the Department in the guise of the Institute’s guest lecturer, living classic of the physical sciences and father of the Soviet atomic bomb, Lazarus Lindt. Galina responds to Lazarus’ passion with virulent hatred unto death, with the stubbornness of a simple and shallow nature. She will never love anyone else, not even her son, who commits suicide after a fatal accident befalls his wife, leaving their 5-year-old daughter Lida an orphan. The lovely tomboy Lida soon learns to endure pain, living through the spiteful indiff erence of her grandmother Galina, the physical strains of ballet school, and the despair of unrequited fi rst love. Lida is yet to discover that sometimes you have to go to the farthest ends of the earth and even to die to fi nd your love – and your home.

　　Marina Stepnova has depicted the country’s 20th century on a broad canvas, permeating it with rhyming fates, echoes of feelings, and the tiniest movements of the human soul. The author’s unprecedented literary command enables the reader to marvel and wonder at new meanings underlying the most basic notions of family, home, happiness, and love.

Marina Stepnova

　　Marina Stepnova was born in 1971 in the small town of Efremov, in the Tula region. Marina was raised in Moscow, where she now lives. She graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute and did postgraduate studies at the Institute of World Literature. Stepnova’s translation from Romanian of the play Nameless Star by Mihail Sebastian has been staged by numerous theaters throughout Russia. Marina Stepnova is the author of three novels, including a Big Book Award winning and nationally bestselling novel, the Women of Lazarus and the novel the Surgeon, which won her the nomination for the National Bestseller Prize and broad critical acclaim. Stepnova works as a scriptwriter and contributes to a number of national newspapers.
　　Selected Bibliography
　　2014 –the Italian Lessons, novel
　　2011 – the Women of Lazarus, novel
　　2005 – the Surgeon, novel