The Village at the Edge of Noon

Price range: £5.99 through £9.99

Everything you were afraid to find out about the heat of noon and grandma’s old tales comes together in this English language debut of an award-winning and bestselling young Russian writer.


Translated by Ilona Chavasse

 

What if summer never ends?

Residents of a Russian village wake up one morning to find that everything has changed. The road to the motorway has disappeared. The paths into woods all lead back to the village. If you enter the woods, your fate is either to vanish into thin air, or to return as a different version of yourself.

Normality becomes a thing of the past as objects mutate, devices emit odd sounds, no one knows who the next victim to disappear will be. Without the internet and modern technology, the residents are stuck in a seemingly never ending summer, punctuated by strange noises and stranger visitations. As the forest grows closer, villagers must try to differentiate between ally and foe.

In the midst of the chaos, there’s Katya, the only one who seems to understand what’s happening …

File under: Nosy Neighbours | Bad Tech, Worse Heat | What’s Going On? | Don’t Trust Anyone

 

Ilona Chavasse spends a lot of time hiding out in places, reading. In time left spare, she works in UK trade publishing and translates from Russian. She is the translator, among other works, of Yuri Rytkheu’s When the Whales Leave.
Darya Bobyleva (Дарья Бобылёва) was born in Moscow and is a graduate of the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. Starting with short stories, she was first published in literary journals and magazines, until the trade publication of a short story collection, "The Forgotten Man". Surprised by the critical perception of her work as horror, Darya decided to try her hand at the genre – the “dacha gothic” novel V’jurki (in English re-titled The Village at the Edge of Noon) rooted in Slavic folklore…
Facebook

Release Date

2023-07-25

Formats

Ebook, Paperback

EBook ISBN

25th July 2023 | 9780857669919 | epub & mobi | £4.99/$6.99/$7.99

Paperback ISBN

25th July 2023 | 9780857669902 | Trade Paperback | £9.99/$15.99/$16.99

“An age-old tale melded with the cosiness of the quotidian and multiplied by the greenly-scented, ancient call of the wild – that’s what Bobyleva’s writing is made from. Her inhuman creatures speak to modernity in the manner of Bulgakov and Gogol, and they come with a warning that humans are responsible for how they conduct their own lives.”
– Anna Zhuchkova, Literatura magazine