From the winner of Russia’s biggest literary prizes, a richly layered novel in which a celebrated guitarist robbed of his talent by Parkinson’s disease seeks other paths to immortality: by authorizing a biography and by mentoring a thirteen-year-old virtuoso battling cancer.
This personal story of a lifetime quest for meaning will resonate with readers of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Umberto Eco, and Solzhenitsyn. Expanding the literary universe spun in his earlier novels, Vodolazkin explores music and fame, belonging and purpose, time and eternity. At the stunning finale of Brisbane, all the carefully knit stitches unravel into a riddle: Whose story is it – the subject’s or the writer’s? Are art and love really no match for death? Is Brisbane, the city of our dreams, our only hope for the future?