The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Red Crosses, Sasha Filipenko

Red Crosses

Sasha Filipenko

Sasha Filipenko traces the arc of Russian history from Stalin's terror to the present day, in a novel full of heart and humanity.


One struggles not to forget, while the other would like nothing better. Tatiana Alexeyevna is an old woman, over ninety, rich in lived experience, and suffering from Alzheimer's. Every day, she loses a few more of her irreplaceable memories. Alexander is a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two.


Tatiana tells her young neighbor her life story, a story that encompasses the entire Russian 20th century with all its horrors and hard-won humanity. Little by little, the old woman and the young man forge an unlikely friendship and make a pact against forgetting.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Europa Editions
  • Publish Date: Aug 24th, 2021
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.20in - 0.70in - 0.45lb
  • EAN: 9781609456931
  • Categories: LiteraryHistorical - GeneralSagas

More books to explore

Book Cover for: Mercury Pictures Presents, Anthony Marra
Book Cover for: A Crossing of Hearts, Michel Tremblay
Book Cover for: The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
Book Cover for: City of Darkness, City of Light, Marge Piercy
Book Cover for: Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz
Book Cover for: Dreams of Joy, Lisa See
Book Cover for: Tuscan Rose, Belinda Alexandra
Book Cover for: The Mirrored World, Debra Dean
Book Cover for: White Gardenia, Belinda Alexandra
Book Cover for: Dream When You're Feeling Blue, Elizabeth Berg
Book Cover for: Lucifer and the Great Baltimore Brawl, Howard Weinstein
Book Cover for: The Children Left Behind: A completely heart-wrenching and uplifting historical novel, Lizzie Page
Book Cover for: The Note: An utterly heartbreaking and completely gripping World War Two novel, Carly Schabowski
Book Cover for: When Friends Become Lovers, Peter Rimmer
Book Cover for: The Ration Book Baby: An utterly heart-wrenching and uplifting World War 2 saga, Ellie Curzon

About the Author

Filipenko, Sasha: -

Sasha Filipenko, born in Minsk in 1984, is a Belarusian author who writes in Russian. After abandoning his classical music training, he studied literature in St. Petersburg and worked as a journalist, screenwriter and author for a satire show. Sasha Filipenko lives in St. Petersburg.

Baer, Brian James: -

Brian James Baer is the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies. He is the translator of Stories by Mikhail Zhvanetsky and Not Just Brodsky by Sergei Dovlatov, and the author of the monograph Other Russias (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Vayner, Elln: -

Ellen Vayner has translated short stories, magazine interviews, and a conceptual artistic project. Her first full-length translation was Sacred Darkness.

Praise for this book

"A moving meditation on memory, forgetfulness, and the thirst for connection."--Oprah Daily


"If you want to get inside the head of modern, young Russia, read Filipenko."--Svetlana Alexievich (Nobel Prize winner, 2015)


"The most interesting thing [about Red Crosses] was to hear the voice of a young writer, from a generation who barely knew the Soviet times, and to see how he grapples with the subject... Nothing unlocks the human soul as profoundly as a novel can."--Los Angeles Review of Books


"Belarusian author Filipenko lays bare the recent history of a ruthless Russian state with the story of an unlikely friendship between a young widower and a survivor of Stalin's gulag... [He] brings freshness and wit to a familiar story of Soviet tragedy."--Publishers Weekly


"[Red Crosses] explores 100 years of Russian history in under 200 pages... with an absurdist twist, focusing on the cruelty of the gulags and the failure of a bureaucratic system that was doomed from the start."--PopMatters


"Sasha Filipenko expertly links past and present, building a bridge between intimacy and otherness."--Kurier


"A tour de force. A book full of sound and fury, but also greatness and gentleness."--Le Figaro littéraire