The Vanishing Futurist

Easily the most original novel of the year… This is the book I’ll be giving people for Christmas.

An extraordinary novel which captures the mixture of tragedy and idealism that has characterised Russia’s modern history.

Like her futurist's revolutionary schemes, Charlotte Hobson's novel is a marvel: a beautiful lament for doomed dreams and innocents crushed by history's brutality, an expedition on the hazy border between victimhood and guilt – and, at the same time, an ingenious, vivid, mesmerising story. I loved it.

The Vanishing Futurist is breath-takingly original, luminously intelligent and impossible to put down. It is a great novel by any measure.

Deftly pulls you into the exhilarating vortex of revolution, and leaves you weeping yet somehow full of wonder on the other side. That rare case of a profound book being unputdownable.

Hobson’s award-winning memoir [Black Earth City], as dreamily lyrical and pragmatic as any Russian novel, beautifully captured the uncertainty, chaos and infectious euphoria of the end of the cold war. Fifteen years on, and Hobson has turned to fiction to examine perhaps the most epoch-defining point in Russia’s history – the revolutions of 1917, the dissolution of tsarist rule, the Bolshevik rising, subsequent civil war and its aftermath – choosing a protagonist who, like Hobson herself in Black Earth City, is an English outsider in Russia during a period of turbulence and wild optimism. The result is a rapturous, carnival-like ride into political disorder, heady romance and absurdity as one societal infrastructure is dismantled and replaced with another ... What is conveyed most affectingly, with all the reviving powers of a shot of Armenian brandy, is the exhilaration and promise of a dream, an exceptional historical moment that continues to reverberate today.