★ In the darkness of the tunnel, we glimpse the true face of humanity.
★ Winner of the 2025 Big Book Award for Best Audiobook—the first title ever to claim this category since the prize was founded!
★ Short-listed for the 2025 Knižnye Lyudi Book People Award in Contemporary Fiction!
★ Selected for the 2025 French booksellers’ La Bête noire Prize!
★ The most hotly anticipated screen adaptation of 2025! A film series based on the novel is now in production, slated for 2026 release!
★ Hundreds trapped underground—does any light await at the tunnel’s end? A disaster thriller brimming with suspense, social commentary, and an unflinching look at human nature. A front-row seat as every moral baseline is crossed. Mass panic, moral collapse, resource wars—only later will the survivors look back and confront what they have done.
★ Over 50,000 copies sold in print; 100,000+ e-book downloads; 120,000+ audiobook downloads!
★ Topped Yandex’s 2014 best-seller list (Thriller category)! Second place, 2024 Big Book Award Readers’ Choice Prize! Rights already sold to France and Bulgaria! Rave reviews in France Bleu, La Voix du Nord, L’Obs, Le Craft du Roman, and other leading French media!
★ Six years in the making by international best-selling author Yana Vagner! Her previous work was adapted into a hit Netflix series recommended by Stephen King himself!
★ English sample chapters available; complete French translation ready.

A long highway tunnel linking Moscow to its suburbs snakes beneath the river. A July weekend is ending; traffic is grid-locked.
Inside the jam: elderly dacha owners whose cars are stuffed with just-picked fruit and vegetables; a young family whose baby sleeps in a safety seat; bored teenagers slumped in back rows; the occasional pick-up, van, or refrigerated truck; a wary police cruiser; a dark-windowed limousine; a beat-up taxi blasting deafening music—a typical urban tableau.
Also present: a Mercedes-driving civil servant, miners, policemen, summer residents, migrant workers, a teacher, a plumber, an engineer…
Mid-tunnel, radio dies, phones lose signal, and the flow of cars simply stops. At first people wait politely, assuming an accident or yet another official motorcade. When the standstill drags on, curiosity wins; drivers step out, chat, speculate. Impatience spurs a small group to hike the several kilometres to the exit. They race back white-faced—passage is impossible. Rumour spreads like wildfire; panic swells. The crowd retreats to the entrance only to find it sealed by towering grilles and a concrete gate—the same barrier that only minutes earlier doomed a reckless driver who tried to break through.
While rescue is still expected, civility survives: jokes, shared water, whispered comfort to restless children. But as the hours crawl by and no help arrives, isolation gnaws at sanity. Cut off from the world and from every other stretch of the tunnel, ordinary citizens mutate into a frantic mob.
A criminal seizes his moment: he breaks free from the police car, kills an officer, claims a gun. Construction workers resort to extreme measures, trying to slice through power cables and breach the tunnel walls—futile. After a general blackout, the air thins; trapped beneath the earth, people behave as though the apocalypse has come. Tension peaks when they discover a bunker stocked with air canisters, weapons, and supplies—too small for everyone.
Nearly thirty hours later the gates groan open; rescuers and ambulances pour in. The catastrophe’s cause is revealed: an unprecedented cyber-attack on the city’s infrastructure and key transport hubs. Survivors—gaunt, traumatised—stagger into daylight, feeling they have crawled out of an endless subterranean nightmare. Yet for some, salvation never arrives.
The novel is laced with razor-sharp observations, dark humour, and chilling generalisations. What begins as a panoramic snapshot of our world ends with a gut-punch realisation of its terrifying literary power. Sooner or later every character must look back—and judge what they have done.

【Author】Yana Vagner
Contemporary novelist, translator, and journalist; unrivalled in portraying the fracturing of human nature under extreme pressure.
Born 1973 in Moscow to a bilingual family (her mother, a Czech, arrived in the 1960s to study Russian language and literature).
Graduated from Moscow State University in Management. Former translator, radio host, and logistics manager—jobs that took her across Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
In 2011 she began serialising To the Lake (later retitled Survivors of the Great Flu) on her blog; it became a best-seller, was translated into a dozen languages, and adapted into the acclaimed Netflix series endorsed by Stephen King.
Follow-ups: Truly Human, Accomplices, and the stand-alone The Tunnel. Film versions of both Accomplices and The Tunnel are now in development.
The Tunnel won the 2025 Big Book Award for Best Audiobook—the first title ever to do so—and is short-listed for the Book People Award and the French La Bête noire Prize.