The Dream Life of Sukhanov - Tapa dura

At the age of fifty-six, Anatoly Sukhanov has everything a man could want: a glittering career, a beautiful wife and two children, a grand apartment in the smartest part of Moscow. He thinks, possibly, he has achieved his dream - 'to carve from the world around him a small, secure happiness, all his own'. Then perestroika dawns and the rigid structures of the world in which Sukhanov has thrived begin to crumble and he is beset by heartbreaking visions from his past: many years ago Sukhanov had been a brilliant young artist in Moscow, but, fearing the stifling hand of the state, he made a decision to abandon his dreams in favour of a life of comfort and, most of all, safety. Now, as the shadows of his past bring him to a terrifying state of uncertainty he begins to realise that perhaps when he compromised his dreams to live a better life, he ended up hardly living at all.

Brilliantly imagined, moving and with a driving plot, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is an utterly original tale of hope and fear, youth and old age, by a remarkable new talent in contemporary fiction.