Guzel Yakhina is the most striking debutante in the history of modern Russian literature, winner of the Bolshaya Kniga and Yasnaya Polyana awards, and author of the bestsellers Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes and My Children.
Her new book, Echelon to Samarkand, is a travel novel and a kind of 'red western.' It is 1923. Echelon commander Deyev and Commissar Belaya evacuate five hundred homeless children from Kazan to Samarkand. A series of exciting and terrifying adventures along the way, a vast geography—from the forests of the Volga region and the Kazakh steppes to the deserts of Kyzyl-Kum and the mountains of Turkestan, a palette of destinies and characters: peasant refugees, security officers, Cossacks, the eccentric world of little vagabonds with their language, psychology, superstitions, and hopes…

“I can say that such books are born very rarely and change everyone who reads them. We all remember this feeling from Platonov: what you read changed you. In my memory, I also recalled the journeys of Marco Polo and Afanasy Nikitin to the unattainable, luxurious East, to a land of satiety and cruel savagery, a craving for warmth, for terrible warmth, for heat, for a mirage in the desert. And this, thank God, is also a Robinson Crusoe-like experience. A genre that promises salvation at the end…” (Elena Kostyukovich)