"In the transfixing latest from Russian writer Lebedev, the ghosts of wars past are exhumed in 2014 eastern Ukraine . . . juxtaposes stark and horrifying present-day images, such as bodies falling from a passenger plane shot down by Russian forces, with lyrical impressions . . . It's a bleak and electrifying tour de force."--Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

"In Sergei Lebedev's harrowing novel The Lady of the Mine murdered souls buried in an abandoned Ukrainian coal mine haunt the country's emerging conflict with Russia . . . With poetic intensity and unflinching imagery . . . reveals obscured atrocities while creating hellish landscapes of the past and present."--Foreword Reviews

"A monumental feat. Lebedev mines the blackest seams of the Soviet Union's past and Russian's more recent to conjure up a book of rare elemental power that lays bare the dark forces driving Putin's Russia today. There is no braver and more important writer of his generation."--Catherine Belton, author of Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West

"Lebedev's new novel is magnificent, a haunted, disturbing book. In Eastern Ukraine, an old mine holds thick sediments of human bones and souls, but there has been no reckoning, no trial of those who killed. You cannot read this cry for justice without wishing that the dead might finally speak--and that they might be heard."--Catherine Merridale, author of Lenin on the Train

"Lebedev has written a tough work of historical fiction that slowly builds toward a series of translucent revelations . . . The Lady of the Mine is an important novel that uses death and the denial of its memory to make a case for how poorly we understand the wants of the victims of fascism, forgetting that even those without life still deserve dignity."--PopMatters

"Disturbing . . . I have read nothing so descriptive and efficient in communicating the grim and ghastly effects of the war on the Donetsk region as Lebedev's remarkable novel."--Russian Life

Praise for Sergei Lebedev's earlier books:

"A tour de force--exquisite and gripping, finely translated, fiction that pulls you into the beautiful and brutal service of imagining and understanding the human realities of modern Russia, a series of tales meticulously crafted and deeply imagined."--Philippe Sands, author of East West Street, The Ratline, and The Last Colony

"One of Russia's most prominent contemporary writers, Lebedev, 41, has been hailed for a series of novels that hold a mirror up to Russia's blighted past. A former geologist, he chips away at the deep strata of his country's 20th century history, the seams of trauma concealed by a state-sanctioned campaign of oblivion."--The Financial Times

"Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country's history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness ... The best of Russia's younger generation of writers."--The New York Review of Books

"A geologist by training, Lebedev's fiction excavates what lies beneath: the inner lives of earlier generations, buried under layers of official myth and self-deceit ... the strange dualism that allows loving fathers to serve tyranny by day and to tuck their children up at night."--The Guardian