Name: The Testament
SKU: 17401
Availability: InStock

Description

The Testament is a new book just published in English (“The Packed Moon” is the original title of a work published some time ago in Russian) by famous writer and journalist David Guy. The novel is about life, death, and war in Ukraine. The title is taken from W. Auden’s famous “Funeral Blues” translated by Brodsky:

Extinguish the constellations and look no more
Up. Pack up the moon and take the sun apart,
Drain the ocean in a cup, sweep the forest clean,
From now on, there’s nothing more to be found in them

The plot of the novel can be summarized in a few lines. An elderly immigrant writer dies in New York. Three suitcases of his archives are left behind, and by the will of circumstances they fall into the hands of his grandson, a Harvard graduate who speaks and reads fluent Russian. Sorting through the papers and photographs, the grandson tries to live his grandfather’s life. A vivid human destiny appears before him — with discoveries, losses, sufferings, loves, betrayals, sorrows, losses and gains. It is about unraveling secrets, mysteries, looking into the innermost corners of the soul, answering the question his grandfather will never be able to answer: is what he strived for higher than what he fought against? The war in Ukraine fits organically into the narrative, which is conducted in the name of the grandson: he is involved in the events caused by the Russian aggression, he participates in the rescue of a Kiev woman – the granddaughter of a close friend of his grandfather. And then the unexpected announcement…

All of this gives the novel an acute sense of urgency.

About the author

David Guy (born 1941) is a Russian-American writer and journalist. For about thirty years he was a leading columnist for the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva (The Evening Moscow). He is the author of more than 30 books. Since 1993 he has lived in the United States, where he worked as editor of the newspaper “Jewish World”, the largest Russian-language American publication – “Russian Advertising” and the newspaper “In the New World”. Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of the international literary magazine “Vremena”. He is a regular participant of the program “Press Club” on the Russian-American TV channel RTN.

He is the author of the documentary research “The Tenth Circle”, dedicated to the life, struggle and death of the Minsk ghetto. This book was published in the United States in English under the title Innocence in Hell. His several trips to Kabul became the basis for the documentary book “Invasion” (co-authored with V. Snegirev) — about the war unleashed by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It is rightly considered to be one of the most honest and frank accounts of that war.

In recent years he has published two new novels in Russia — “Jackpot” and “Subjunctive Inclination”, as well as a collection of documentary novels “Heavenly Attraction”. In 2009 in Moscow published a 750-page novel “In the midst of the whirling of the earth…”, dedicated to the life of three generations of one family — in Russia and the United States. This family saga was highly appreciated by readers and the press. In 2012 in the U.S. saw the light of the sharp-grotesque novel by David Guy — “Terrarium”. The main character of the work is the current leader of Russia. In 2015, the novel “Disappearance” was published in the United States and in Ukraine, the main character of which is Putin’s double. In 2018, the final part of the trilogy about today’s and tomorrow’s Russia — the novel “Catharsis” — saw the light of day. At the end of June 2020, a new novel “Line of Shadow” (Aleteia Publishing House, St. Petersburg) was published in Russia.