Guzel Yakhina was born and raised in Kazan, graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages, and is studying at the Screenwriting Department of the Moscow Film School. Her work has been published in the magazines Neva, Siberian Lights, and October.
The novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes begins in the winter of 1930 in a remote Tatar village. The peasant woman Zuleikha, along with hundreds of other displaced people, is sent in a boxcar along the eternal penal route to Siberia.
Backwoods peasants and Leningrad intellectuals, declassed elements and criminals, Muslims and Christians, pagans and atheists, Russians, Tatars, Germans, Chuvash—all will meet on the banks of the Angara, daily defending their right to life against the taiga and the ruthless state.
Dedicated to all the dispossessed and resettled.