Steppe (Step)

Ten years after her parents' divorce, a daughter meets her truck driver father and travels with him across central and southern Russia. 'The Steppe' is a new novel by Oksana Vasyakina, which forms a duology with her debut, 'The Wound': the first book is about a daughter's farewell to her deceased mother; the second, about her relationship with her father. Returning to the cab of the truck speeding across the steppe, the heroine reflects on the men whose youth fell in the 1980s and 1990s; on the illnesses from which many of them die silently; on how time exhaled her father, leaving him to the cold winds of the future; and on a Russia unsure what to do with its own history. Oksana Vasyakina is a writer and winner of the Licey (2019) and NOS (2021) awards.