Butterfly Skin (45 page)
Authors: Sergey Kuznetsov
As she gets up, Ksenia notices something glittering in the shadow beside a leg of the table. Gathering up her skirt, she steps across the dead body – and picks up Olya’s bracelet with the dark-red stones.
Playing at snowballs, like little children, riding down slides and laughing in taxis, side by side jogging on running machines, four of you at the Coffee Inn; the baby on the rug, saying “mama,” behind you “I’ll be back” getting closer, what should you do? The boy hears the trembling sound getting louder, out of the bathroom comes Mom in her robe, puts her hand on your forehead and asks: “Are you hot?”; “No more dancing for you, you’ve got to study”; “I love you so much, and I sacrifice everything”; “What will people say, it’s pure filth, you’re my daughter!”; “No point in crying, you just have to fight”; what should you do? A wet face against a warm fluffy sweater. “Your mascara’s run.” – “That’s the snow, Olya, it’s only snow.”
Ksenia, Ksenia, lost little girl, beauty who killed the beast, you’re twenty-three years old, squat down in the dirty, blood-soaked basement and cry, don’t stop, please, please cry, cry.
SERGEY KUZNETSOV was born in Moscow in 1966. In the 1990s he achieved a high profile as one of the pioneers of the internet in Russia, and has written for
The New York Times
,
Harper’s Bazaar, Playboy, Vogue
and
L’Officiel
. His groundbreaking thriller
Butterfly Skin
has been translated into six languages, and in 2001 he became the first Russian journalist to receive a Knight Fellow scholarship from Stanford University. Besides being an entrepreneur and writer, he is editor-in-chief of
Booknik
, an internet publication on Jewish literature and culture. He lives in Paris.
ANDREW BROMFIELD has been a full-time translator from Russian for more than twenty years. He was a co-founder and original editor of
Glas
, a journal of modern Russian literature in English translation. His numerous translations include Mikhail Shishkin’s
Letter-Book (The Light and the Dark)
, works by the Strugatsky brothers, Vladimir Voinovich, Pavel Pepperstein, Olga Slavnikova and Andrey Kurkov, as well as most books by Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin, Mikhail Bulgakov’s
A Dead Man’s Memoirs (A Theatrical Novel)
and
A Dog’s Heart (An Appalling Story)
, Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace – the Original Version
and the two-volume
Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia
.
THE ADJACENT
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST
In the near future, Tibor Tarent, a freelance photographer, is recalled from Anatolia to Britain when his wife, an aid worker, is killed—annihilated by a terrifying weapon that reduces its target to a triangular patch of scorched earth.
A century earlier, Tommy Trent, a stage magician, is sent to the Western Front on a secret mission to render British reconnaissance aircraft invisible to the enemy.
Present day. A theoretical physicist develops a new method of diverting matter, a discovery with devastating consequences that will resonate through time.
The eagerly anticipated new novel from “one of the master illusionists of our time.”
Wired
“Utterly absorbing.”
Library Journal
“A wonderful piece of fiction, an intricate puzzle.”
Publishers Weekly
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST
A stunning literary SF novel from the multiple award-winning Christopher Priest. The Dream Archipelago is a vast network of islands. The names of the islands are different depending on who you talk to, their very locations seem to twist and shift. Some islands have been sculpted into vast musical instruments, others are home to lethal creatures, others the playground for high society.
The Islanders
serves both as an untrustworthy but enticing guide to the islands, an intriguing, multi-layered tale of a murder and the suspect legacy of its appealing but definitely untrustworthy narrator.
“A complex interweaving of plot and ideas, of playful games with reality and serious challenges to our preconceptions. The result is easily one of the richest and most rewarding novels that Priest has written to date.”
LA Review of Books
A glowing mosaic of a novel, puzzling, transporting and nigh-on impossible not to start again immediately once finished.”
The Sunday Times
“He understands the magic of imaginary worlds, where hot winds race across parched landscapes and everyone is a dreamer. It is his first book for nearly ten years, and well worth the wait… engrossing.”
The Mail on Sunday
KEIRAN SHEA
Five hundred years from now, ex-corporate mercenary Koko Martstellar is swaggering through an easy early retirement as a brothel owner on The Sixty Islands, a manufactured tropical resort archipelago known for its sex and simulated violence. Surrounded by slang-drooling boywhores and synthetic komodo dragons, Koko finds the most challenging part of her day might be deciding on her next drink. That is, until her old comrade Portia Delacompte sends a squad of security personnel to murder her.
Now Koko is on the run in the sky-barges of the Second Free Zone, and falling in with Flynn, a depressed local cop readying his nerves for a sanctioned mass suicide known as Embrace. Can Koko and Flynn outfox her hunters until she can confront Delacompte?
“wild ride
…
breakneck pace
…
great fun”
Booklist
(starred review)
“I felt so completely immersed in such a perfectly realized world of the future. Kieran Shea is the breath of fresh air the science fiction genre has been looking for.” Victor Gischler, author of
Ink Mage
and
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse
KEIRAN SHEA
After dispatching the woman hell-bent on destroying her, ex-mercenary turned saloon madam extraordinaire Koko Martstellar is ready to rebuild her life in paradise, along with her lover, former orbital sky-cop and recovering Depressus case Jedidiah Flynn. But the Ultimate Sanction bounty on her head is still outstanding, and Wire will stop at nothing to collect it.
COMING JUNE 2015
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