All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - Softcover

McKeon, Darragh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 144341882X ISBN 13: 9781443418829

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014

Synopsis

A richly evocative debut novel set against one of the most enduring tragedies of recent history

Under a crimson dawn sky, Artyom Telvatnikov stands in a field of cows, his fingertips glistening with warm blood that streams from their ears.

It is April 1986, and ten miles away, above the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, clusters of sparks fill the air, inflaming the final years of the Soviet Union, inciting its citizens to actions of brutality, mystery and terrible beauty. Grigory, a surgeon working in the wake of the disaster, in a place where all natural order has been distorted, is forced to question everything he has known. In Moscow, his estranged wife, Maria, a former dissident, struggles to free herself from the constraints imposed upon her by the state. Her nephew Yevgeni is a nine-year-old piano prodigy whose sense of rhythm is rapidly eroding.

In All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Darragh McKeon blends an array of these and other characters into a strikingly visceral portrait of a place and a people in the midst of terrifying change.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Russia, 1986. On a run-down apartment block in Moscow, a nine-year-old prodigy plays his piano silently for fear of disturbing the neighbors. In a factory on the outskirts of the city, his aunt makes car parts, hiding her dissident past. In a nearby hospital, a surgeon immerses himself in his work, avoiding his failed marriage.

And in a village in Belarus, a teenage boy wakes to a sky of the deepest crimson. Outside, the ears of his neighbor's cattle are dripping blood. Ten miles away, at the Chernobyl Power Plant, something unimaginable has happened.Now their lives will change forever.

An end-of-empire novel charting the collapse of the Soviet Union, All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a gripping and epic love story by a major new talent.

About the Author:

Darragh McKeon was born in 1979 and grew up in the midlands of Ireland. He has worked as a theater director and lives in New York. This is his first novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 144341882X
• ISBN 13: 9781443418829
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400