Eastbound, Maylis De Kerangal
Eastbound, Maylis De Kerangal
List: $15.99 | Sale: $11.20
Club: $7.99

Eastbound

Author: Maylis De Kerangal, Jessica Moore

Narrator: Jennifer Pickens

Unabridged: 2 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/07/2023


Synopsis

In this gripping tale, a Russian conscript and a French woman cross paths on the Trans-Siberian railroad, each fleeing to the east for their own reasons

Eastbound is both an adventure story and a duet of two vibrant inner worlds.

In mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world.

Racing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Hélène, for whom he feels an uncanny trust.

A complicity quickly grows between the two when he manages to urgently ask—through a pantomime and basic Russian that Hélène must decipher—for her help to hide him. They hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Hélène's first-class sleeping car. Aliocha now a hunted deserter and Hélène his accomplice with her own inner landscape of recent memories to contend with.

About Maylis De Kerangal

Maylis De Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including The Heart, which was one of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and won awards including the Wellcome Book Prize, the Grand Prix RTL-Lire, and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Telerama; Naissance d'un pont (published in English as Birth of a Bridge), which won of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Medicis; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Mend the Living was longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2016.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Karen on December 25, 2024

This is quite an adventure story.. taking place across Russia, on board the trans-Siberian heading east. A 20 yr old young man. Aliosha…a conscript for the Russian military, (one of about 100 on this train headed to an unknown post) has already been beaten by two fellow new recruits makes the decisio......more

Goodreads review by Judy on June 08, 2023

When life gets busy, when I've been reading long novels, it is a welcome break to pick up a short novel and savor it. Eastbound takes place in Russia aboard the Trans-Siberian train. Two characters are brought together in an unlikely encounter and change each other in unpredicted ways. 20-year-old Ali......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on May 02, 2023

A train speeding and lurching across a continent evokes an aura of excitement, anticipation and mystery. While the train cuts a swath across the landscape, the passengers it carries are forced together without the knowledge of the background, status or intentions of those who share their confined sp......more

Goodreads review by Paul on September 03, 2022

Helene smiles. She agreed to take Aliocha in without hesitation, without even really weighing his request, and whether suspect ease or absence of discernment it doesn't much matter, she felt overwhelmed by this young man, absolutely unique in the world in the face of his request, and she who had res......more