Ten years ago, a snowstorm prevented Doctor Garin from reaching the village of Dolgoe and vaccinating its inhabitants against a Bolivian virus that turns people into zombies. The doctor miraculously avoided freezing to death in the endless snowy steppe, only to return to a post-apocalyptic world where his patients will be the funniest and most helpless creatures on Earth, former leaders of world powers. This world, where watches are carved from stone and iPhones from wood, is an encyclopedia of Sorokin's dystopia, confidently imbuing the future with features of the dark past.
Despite the usual irony and parodic references to the Russian prose canon, 'Doctor Garin' is distinguished by a noticeably new level of anxiety: the gulag of swamp blackies, a byproduct of the Soviet experiment, turns out to be more terrifying than the atomic bomb. Another radical update is the piercing lyricism. Amid the ruins of a shattered universe, an old-fashioned doctor will meet, lose, and then find his one true love, only to spend the rest of his days treating her.

Vladimir Sorokin is one of the most significant Russian prose writers and a leading exponent of postmodernism. He is the author of ten novels, as well as short stories, plays, and screenplays. He is a winner of the Andrei Bely, NOS, Super-NOS, and Bolshaya Kniga awards, among others, and a nominee for the Man Booker International Prize. Vladimir Sorokin's books have been translated into dozens of languages.