★The book won 2008 Russian Booker Prize!
★ When the book "Librarians" was just a manuscript, it was successfully shortlisted in the "National Bestseller Award" and "Big Book Award", which aroused strong reaction in the literary and reading circles of Russia, aroused fierce debate, and won a lot of praise from the Russian critics!
★In Chinese academic and literary circles, the novel has also been named "the best foreign novel of the 21st Century"!
★Rights sold to World English,Italy,France,Denmark,Estonia,Japan,Latvia,Macedonia,Dutch,Serbia,Bulgaria,Croatia,China!
★Over 50 000 copies sold!
★This is a great fable. The author combines the writing elements of history, martial arts, fable, detective, mystery, fantasy, horror and so on, to create a great fable about man and book, human and reading.
★This is a post-soviet novel that uses fantastical plots to allude to the age, imply the lost time, false nostalgia and the reality of disappointment, introduce a symptomatic topic of historical transition: how to evaluate Soviet history and confront the social reality of contemporary Russia.
★Complete English translation available.

The Socialist realism novels by Gromov, some mediocre Soviet author who died in the eighties totally forgotten, suddenly become a treasure: it is discovered that the books possess magic powers. If read intently, they can change the physical condition, the state of mind, and psyche of a reader, each book in its own way. The boring novels with original titles like “Fly, Happiness!” or “Silver Valley” are actually the Book of Power, Book of Memory, Book of Wrath, Book of Joy, and Book of Strength, and affect a reader correspondingly.

In “Gromov’s” reality, where the books – or rather the eff ects they produce – become the most appreciated value, people who once read a novel of Gromov’s are obsessed with getting the other ones. This results in the emergence of half-mystical, half-military sects called “libraries” (sometimes in quite unsuitable places, such as prisons or old people’s homes), each run by a “Librarian” In their quest for Gromov’s books, the libraries cooperate or fight with each other, with kitchen knives and ladles for armaments and old car tyres for protection, sometimes with devastating outcomes. The ultimate goal of all the libraries is to fi nd the banned Book of Meaning, the entire edition of which was destroyed due to Krushchev’s anti-Stalin campaign.

Oblivious of the existence of “Gromov’s universe”, a young man named Alexei Vyazintsev arrives in a provincial town, coming into possession of a flat inherited from his deceased uncle – but instead fi nds himself in the possession of another inheritance. His uncle was an infl uential “librarian”, and now Alexei is to take his place. He will fi ght together with the members of his library for Gromov’s books, until he reaches the long-desired one, the Book of Meaning, to discover the greatest, and probably the weirdest, secret of all.

Mikhail Elizarov creates shocking descriptions, picturesque battle scenes, and yearning pathos, entangled in all-enveloping irony, to draw the reader implicitly into a world where reading is the only possible mode of existence for both individual and nation.

Mikhail Elizarov
　　WINNER OF THE RUSSIAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008!
　　Mikhail Elizarov was born in 1973 in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine. He studied philology in Kharkov State University and fi lm direction in the Fine Arts Academy. In the late nineties Mikhail worked as
a cameraman.
　　In 2001 he continued studying in Germany, where he now lives. He contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines, such as Playboy, GQ, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
　　Mikhail is the author of prize-winning novels (The Earth (2020), Pasternak, Librarian, The Cartoons) and several collections of short stories. All of them were nominated for major literary prizes.