“The novel is a vivid depiction of human cruelty, selfishness, and stupidity—qualities that know no age. The shattered bond between Katya and her parents is not generational conflict but a catastrophic absence of empathy and dialogue; that absence is the book’s core theme.” —Prochtenie

“This writer clearly knows the smell of death.” —Afisha

“Alexander Pushin Prize-winner Ekaterina Manoilova’s debut tells of Katya—daughter of the Kazakh Serikbay and his Russian wife Naina—and reads like a tale from the distant past, when bride-kidnapping reigned and mothers-in-law tyrannized brides. Yet 34-year-old Manoilova, herself the daughter of a Kazakh father and Russian mother, has invented nothing.” —Forbes.ru

★ Over 40,000 copies sold! Film rights already optioned!
★ Short-listed for the 2023 Yasnaya Polyana Prize and the 2023 Big Book Award!
★ An epic of “awakening” and “escape,” a searing portrait of women surviving—and resisting—a patriarchal cage. A devastating literary debut that fuses family trauma, cultural collision, and female coming-of-age; its emotional depth and social insight are unforgettable.
★ In Katya’s homeland, women’s bodies belong to no one themselves: bride-kidnapping, son-preference, domestic violence. In time the village women themselves become guardians and accomplices of the system. The novel recounts not only Katya’s story but an entire female genealogy of fates and choices under oppression.
★ Even before publication, Ekaterina Manoilova’s debut drew wide literary attention: in 2022 it won the Alexander Pushkin Literary Prize (Litsei Prize) for Best Prose and the Critics’ Choice Award.
★ With uncompromising honesty, Manoilova writes of domestic violence, the search for ethnic and cultural identity, a child’s revolt against her parents, life that triumphs over death, and the unquenchable thirst for freedom. As the author says, the novel is inspired by her own life.
★ The book’s architecture is built on contrasts: the brutal, frank, unyielding customs of the Kazakh interior versus the tenderness and fragility of the girls who live there; the suffocating dreariness of human life versus the majestic steppe; the characters’ cruel, hyper-real actions versus the soft, angelic voice of Katya’s dead brother, drifting across the village and exposing its secrets.

Katya’s mother is Russian, her father Kazakh; she grows up in a Kazakh village on the Russian border. From birth she feels an unwanted burden—everyone awaits a “proper” child, a boy. When she is seven, a brother is finally born. After the agony of childbirth, her mother finds solace in Orthodox Christianity; her father becomes a long-haul trucker and seldom returns. At two, little Marat still cannot speak, but he sings with the angelic voice of Robertino Loretti. As her parents drift apart, Katya becomes the boy’s caretaker—until the day Marat dies in an accident caused by their father, which Katya witnesses. After the funeral, her mother flees with the family’s meagre savings and donates everything to a monastery; her father drowns himself in alcohol. Miraculously, Katya’s grandmother takes her to Moscow, leaving behind both literal and metaphorical ruins.
Since the boy’s funeral, villagers have heard Marat singing. Sometimes he exposes their shameful secrets, sometimes he warns of coming accidents, illnesses, deaths. Katya’s father, too, sees Marat shortly before suffering a stroke.
Now twenty-five, Katya lives in Moscow. After her grandmother’s death she is alone, working as a sound designer with a razor-sharp ear for the world’s noises, renting a tiny room from an abusive landlord, trying to carve out a place in the metropolis. When her aunt calls—demanding justice after her father’s death—Katya hopes to invest the proceeds from the sale of the family house in a Moscow flat. But her relatives have other plans for the property.
Returning to the village, Katya finds the nightmare of her childhood intact. The birth of a girl is still no cause for celebration, bride-kidnapping remains routine, domestic violence and abuse are simply the texture of daily life. These are not only ethnic traditions but the accepted reality of her own family. Katya summons the moral courage to challenge these customs and confront the demons of her past—but will she dare face her dead father when cousins lock her inside his tomb to be rid of an unwanted heir? And when she hears her dead brother’s voice, what song will Marat sing for her?
The debut’s structure rests on contrasts: the cruel, blunt, uncompromising customs of the Kazakh interior versus the tenderness and vulnerability of girls and children; the oppressive dreariness of human existence versus the boundless, majestic steppe; the heroes’ brutal, hyper-real actions versus the gentle, angelic voice of Katya’s dead brother, drifting across the village and exposing its secrets.

【Author】 Ekaterina Manoilova (b. 1988)
Born in 1988 in Orsk, Russia, a city near the Kazakh border. She comes from a mixed Kazakh-Russian family. Graduated from the Moscow Literary Institute in 2022. Married, mother of three daughters, owner of a dog and a cat.
Her debut novel The Steppe Wind Is Free, and So Are You (also titled Father Looks West) won the Alexander Pushkin Literary Prize (Litsei Prize) for Best Prose and the Critics’ Choice Award even before its 2022 release. Within a year it sold more than 40,000 copies, was short-listed for the 2023 Yasnaya Polyana Prize, and long-listed for the 2023 Big Book Award. As Manoilova notes, the novel grew out of her own return to her native village to settle inheritance matters after her father’s funeral.
Her second novel, The Wind Whirls the Leaves, a road-thriller about two sisters fleeing their abusive father, was published by Alpina Non-Fiction in early 2024.
【Main Works】
2024: The Wind Whirls the Leaves, novel
2023: The Steppe Wind Is Free, and So Are You / Father Looks West, novel
【Awards】
2022 Alexander Pushkin Literary Prize
2022 Critics’ Choice Award
2023 Yasnaya Polyana Prize – short list
2023 Big Book Award – long list