In the 1970s Soviet Union, an isolated family is disturbed by industrialization.The Kol family has lived alone in southern Siberia for decades. They belong to an ultratraditional sect of Christianity known as the Old Believers, and persecution by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviets has driven them into the wilderness. Agafia, now in her 30s, has never met anyone outside her family, though she's sometimes visited by visions of Peter the Great. The Kols' isolation ends when a helicopter delivers Galina, a successful geologist, and her pilot, Snow Crane, who are surveying the area for a new iron mine. Over the course of a few months, Galina falls in love with Snow Crane and with the Russian landscape the proposed iron mine would inevitably destroy. Worse, Agafia's siblings soon die from a disease the geologists may have brought with them. "First the germs, then the mine," Galina muses. "By the time we're done here, we'll kill off everything in the taiga." That winter, Galina and Snow Crane return to Moscow while Agafia is drawn deeper into the real world, meeting a hunter and a monastery of Old Believer nuns. Like her characters, Zhorov has deep respect for the physical world, and she honors it with poetic language. Here's how she describes Snow Crane preparing to summit Mount Elbrus, Russia's highest peak: "Snow Crane laid his head on the ground. Deep below the grass and granite, he heard the slow churning of melted lava, the sleeping volcano's gentle snores." The novel is inspired by the real story of Agafia Lykov, an Old Believer who grew up in isolation and is nearing 80 years old.An elegant, melancholy debut written in gorgeous prose.

Zhorov’s lyrical debut presents two worlds colliding in the U.S.S.R. of the 1970s. Galina is a Moscow-dwelling geologist on a mission to remote Siberia. Here she meets Agafia, whose homestead is the only mark of civilization in the vast forest. Agafia is an Old Believer, born here decades earlier after her parents fled Stalin’s persecution. Her contact with Galina comes after years of seeing no one except her father and two older siblings; their mother died years earlier, and Agafia’s closest confidant is an apparition of Peter the Great. Now, in her 30s, Agafia experiences sex with an itinerant hunter. The narrative skips between the two women’s points of views and delves into their back stories, showing how Galina has chafed against the Soviet bureaucracy as well as her father’s pressure to marry. In Siberia, she finds comfort in a loving relationship with her pilot, a former labor camp inmate nicknamed Snow Crane, and undergoes what Snow Crane dubs her “first crisis of the soul,” despairing at her collusion in a mining operation that will threaten Agafia’s home. Meanwhile, after Agafia learns of a monastery of Old Believers, Snow Crane agrees to take her there. Through artful juxtaposition and exquisite descriptions of the seemingly static world of rocks, Zhorov illuminates her characters’ political and spiritual legacies. This novel’s well-wrought themes of environmental devastation and rebellion will resonate with readers. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Aug.)