The Vanishing Futurist

Review Easily the most original novel of the year. This is the book I'll be giving people for Christmas. -- Cressida Connolly ― Spectator Books of the YearAn extraordinary novel which captures the mixture of tragedy and idealism that has characterised Russia's modern history. -- Marcel TherouxLike 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. -- A.D. Miller, author of Snowdrops and The Faithful CoupleThe Vanishing Futurist is breath-takingly original, luminously intelligent and impossible to put down. It is a great novel by any measure. -- Antony BeevorDeftly 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. -- Peter PomerantsevHobson'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. -- Catherine Taylor ― GuardianThe tale ping-pongs between the conservative and the absurd, and the style has shades of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita ... A very accomplished first novel. -- Jane Bradley ― Scotland on SundayHilary Mantel once said of Elizabeth Jane Howard that 'She reminds us of what novels are for.' While I yield to no one in my admiration for Ms Mantel, I feel that this statement is far more applicable to The Vanishing Futurist. It is wonderful - in its ambition, its insistence on the truth, its refusal to be daunted. -- Artemis CooperHobson has a wonderful gift for writing about Russia with a deeply Russian tenderness that makes me go week at the knees. Russia is mad, and at its best it's also very intimate, and she writes about it from the inside ... Heart-breaking, funny and brilliant. -- Rosamund Bartlett, author of Tolstoy: A Russian LifeThis debut novel delves deep into the complex Russian psyche of the period. Accomplished. -- IndependentThe book's strength is its portrayal of the Russian avant-garde scene, with its futurist performances and poetry, seen through the eyes of a newcomer. -- Anna Aslayan ― SpectatorWhile Charlotte Hobson's debut novel covers well-trodden ground - the years immediately before and after the 1917 [Russian] revolution - it does so with unusual imagination and elegance ... A powerful study of the gap between ideal and reality. -- Orlando Bird ― Daily Telegraph Product Description Now a BBC Radio 4 Book at BedtimeThe debut novel from award-winning author of Black Earth City: A Year in the Heart of Russia.When twenty-two-year-old Gerty Freely travels to Russia to work as a governess in early 1914, she has no idea of the vast political upheavals ahead, nor how completely her fate will be shaped by them.In 1917, revolution sweeps away the Moscow Gerty knew. The middle classes - and their governesses - are fleeing the country, but she stays, throwing herself into an experiment in communal living led