Lost Believers

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.)