Steppe by Vasyakina, Oksana
Steppe by Vasyakina, Oksana

Steppe

A visceral, stirring novel following a queer literature student traveling across Russia with her estranged father, a...
$46.29 USD
$88.99 USD
$46.29 USD
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Author: Oksana Vasyakina
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $46.29
Steppe by Vasyakina, Oksana

Steppe

$88.99 $46.29
Steppe by Vasyakina, Oksana

Steppe

$88.99 $46.29
Author: Oksana Vasyakina
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description
A visceral, stirring novel following a queer literature student traveling across Russia with her estranged father, a long haul truck driver secretly dying of AIDS, from the acclaimed author of Wound

A decade after her father walks out on her family, the narrator of Steppe, now a literature student, goes on the road with him as he makes deliveries across the vast plains of Russia. She's both drawn to and repulsed by his rugged life as a trucker, eager to understand the person who made her.

But the prematurely aged, embittered man secretly being consumed by AIDS who meets her at the train station has little revelation to offer her yearning heart. As he drives her across desolate landscapes in his freight truck, the narrator tugs on the few threads that make him her family, and reflects on her father's small role in Russia's violent patriarchal structure and the chaos and depravity of the post-Soviet 1990s. Always humming in the background, the austere beauty and mercurial nature of the steppe reminds her of the contradictions at the heart of their relationship--both natural and forced, intimate and alienated.

Oksana Vasyakina's second novel pierces the surface of human relations and reaches into the depths of shame, longing, and grief that lie beneath. In simple, precise prose, she paints a vivid portrait of estrangement and situates it in the broader context of her country's attempts to reckon with its troubled history.

Author: Oksana Vasyakina
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 01/20/2026
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 8.54h x 5.84w x 0.96d
ISBN: 9781646223077


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/20/2025
Booklist 11/01/2025
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2026

About the Author
OKSANA VASYAKINA is a Russian poet and curator. Her debut poetry collection, Women's Prose, was short-listed for the Andrei Bely Prize in 2016, and her debut novel, Wound, won the NOS Prize in 2021.

ELINA ALTER is a writer and translator. Her work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, The Paris Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Circumference, a journal of translation and international culture.
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