Devil's Wheel

Mikhail Gigolashvili b. 1954 — a prose writer and philologist, author of the novels Tolmach, The Capture of Moscow, Devil's Wheel, The Secret Year, Coca. Finalist of the Big Book, Russian Booker, and National Bestseller awards. Georgia, the late eighties, perestroika. Tbilisi youth addicted to opiates, cops indistinguishable from thieves in law, intelligentsia, party nomenclature — the detailed characters of the novel Devil's Wheel suffer from physical withdrawal, personality breakdown, and a shift in eras and concepts. Through small details, through sharply heard phrases and accurately captured social moods, a complex and terrifying image of a great empire on the brink of collapse emerges. Drugs in this dense, populous, epochal novel — are no more than machine oil, a lubricant that allows an astonishingly elegant and well-structured mechanism to come into motion. Galina Yuzefovich The panoramic scope, phenomenal "evidential base," and dark background humor create an effect in which, against common sense, you try to read seven hundred pages in one go. Lev Danilkin