Maria Galina

Medvedki

Mole Cricets Novel. Eksmo. Moscow 2011. 230 pages

Awards:

2011 Best Book World of Fantastika 2012 Big Book finalist 2012 Big Book Reader’s choice 2. winner 2012 Strannik Award 2012 Filigran Award 2012 Marble Faun Award

Foreign rights:

Arabic/ Arab Scientific Publishers

Galina set a triptych of novels in Ukraine: Little Boondock takes place in Odessa; Mole Cricets is set in the Odessa region, near Snake Island, where legend says Achilles was buried; and Lviv is the stage for Autochthons, an unusual detective novel. The three books play on fantasy, myth, geography, and history, creating characters and situations that nimbly combine coziness with unease.

An autistic loser in Odessa in the mid-90s lives in someone else‘s dacha and earns a living by inserting the adventures of customers into well-known books at their requ- est, thereby revealing their secret aspirations and helping to realize hidden dreams.

At the same time, he is in conflict with an unloved and unloving father, who accuses him of not living up to his father‘s expectations. One day, a strange client comes tohim-Smetankin,aformer orphanageresident,andaskshimtocomeupwitha “good” family story. The hero, who is fond of searching for cheap antiques (‘things of the dead’) at flea markets and online auctions, takes an order, selects old photographs of „ancestors“ and invents appropriate biographies for them. As expected, invented biographies are intertwined with real ones, and it turns out that the hero himself and his family history begin to intertwine with the fictitious history of the customer, and the hero’s father begins to experience those feelings for the newly-minted relative that he denied his own son. And when Smetankin gathers together all the newly acquired rela- tives at a gala dinner, the celebration is expectedly resolved by a scandal and reveals a tragic secret hiding behind it.

At the same time, some events convince the hero that Achilles, the son of Hecate, is about to rise from the Serpent‘s Island, where the sanctuary of Achilles the Cannibal, the ancient chthonic god, is about to rise or has already risen in the terrible guise of a monster ...