"Zwinger" will be launched 30/11/2013 at the Non Fiction Book Fair in Moscow.

Rights sold to: Italy – BOMPIANI (2014), Russia – CORPUS BOOKS (november 2013)

The 15th INTERNATIONAL BOOK FAIR OF HIGH-QUALITY NON-FICTION will take place from 27th of November to 1st of December 2013 in Moscow at the Central House of Artists (10, Krymsky Val str.) (see http://www.moscowbookfair.ru/eng/about.html).

Moscow’s ‘Non/Fiction’ Book Fair runs annually for five days. Last year, the fair united 293 participants from 18 countries of Europe, Asia and America. Publishing houses, book-trade systems, literary communities and culture foundations offered bright and high-quality selection of humanitarian, sci-tech, educational, business, publicistic and fiction literature to all kinds of visitors of the Central House of Artists. In 2012, 31.831 people visited to the Non-Fiction Book Fair.

More than 300 business events such as presentations, meetings and panel discussions were held in 7 discussion spaces during all five days of the exhibition. More than 40 International Guests from Belgium, UK, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, USA, Finland, France, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Sweden, Estonia and Japan took part in the Fair, and the programme included more than 300 different events on seven stages, all connected with book publishing, distribution, and promotion of high-quality fiction, humanitarian, and educational literature.

On November 30th at 14.00, in the 1st Seminar Zone of the NON/Fiction fair, Elena Kostioukovitch will be presenting the Russian edition of her ZWINGER novel released by Corpus Books.

http://www.corpus.ru/products/zwinger.htm

Seven wild days in the life of Zwinger’s main character, Victor Sieman, twist together into a tight knot of quest and adventure, where the final, true goal turns out to be finding oneself. The road home and the road to oneself are a classic plot, and the Odysseus-Ulysses of 2005 is a contemporary European intellectual weighted down by knowledge, history, and the baggage of our entire centuries-old culture.

Victor Sieman works for a book publisher, specializing in books on historical archives. As he is preparing to leave for the 2005 Frankfurt Book Fair, he gets a strange phone call. Someone is offering to sell him family documents related to his grandfather's wartime past. His grandfather (modelled on the author's grandfather, Leonid Volynsky) was in Dresden in the first seven days of May 1945, leading the search for paintings from the Dresden Art Museum hidden by the Nazis – and almost paid for it with his freedom and his life.

Now Victor has only seven days to recover his family's papers and uncover details from his family's past – his mother's death, his mysterious father – while keeping up with his important assignment, and searching for the French girl Mireille, who has possibly gotten entangled in a web of secrets, intrigues, threats and cruelty. And what if Mireille is just a tool of her devious puppetmasters?

Rare documents, discoveries and revelations await our hero at every turn – a roller coaster ride through a spy novel together with a criminal thriller, wartime drama, professional journalism (with an insider's knowledge of the book business), and autobiography. The wartime events are meticulously researched and based on the author's family history, and the Moscow Olympics were experienced by the author directly. There is no hearsay in this book: everything is based either in personal memory, or in the hard memory of documents.

In the vortex of Victor's adventures, we find Ukrainian laborers in today's Europe, KGB agents from Brezhnev's time, journalists from «Voice of…» radio stations before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Russian mafia thugs busy colonizing the world.

In a magic kaleidoscope of this novel, there is a succession of personages, some of them famous, others no. Of people whose way of thinking is lofty and sublime. Of Russian and European intellectuals, heroes of our time and of recent age, - with all their particulars and passions attached. While anything is perfect with novel’s adequacy and intriguing plot, its text is a pure delight. Worthy text from the creator of Russian Eco.

- Sasha Sokolov, the author of School for Fools, from the blurb of the Russian edition of Zwinger

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