Eastbound

Written by Maylis de Kerangal

Narrated by Jennifer Pickens

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, Helene, 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 Helene must decipher-for her help to hide him. They hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Helene's first-class sleeping car. Aliocha now a hunted deserter and Helene his accomplice with her own inner landscape of recent memories to contend with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Translator: Jessica Moore
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798765093429

Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several books in French, including Naissance d’un pont, (published in English as Birth of a Bridge), which won of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis in 2010; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama and whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and the winner of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She lives in Paris.