Horsemen of the Sands [Paperback]

Two novellas from one of the most exciting writers in contemporary Russia.

Horsemen of the Sandsgathers two novellas by Leonid Yuzefovich: Horsemen of the Sands and The Storm. The former tells the true story of R.F. Ungern-Shternberg, also known as the Mad Baltic Baron, a military adventurer whose intense fascination with the East drove him to seize control of Mongolia during the chaos of the Russian Civil War. The Storm centers on an unexpected emotional crisis that grips a Russian elementary school on an otherwise regular day, unveiling the vexed emotional bonds and shared history that knit together its community of students, teachers, parents, and staff. This impressive volume . . . Shot through with a mythic and cipherlike style, Yuzefovich’s novellas are cogent depictions of faith, obsession, power, and the ties that bind.  — Publishers Weekly

History and human drama collide in Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands, a wonderful tangle of relationships, religions, and realism...The prose adroitly bears both an ethereal and a concrete quality...culminating in a fascinating meditation on trickery and the power of suggestion. — Meagan Logsdon, Foreword Reviews

[The Storm] asks readers to go beneath the surface, while [Horsemen of the Sands] opens up an unfamiliar world and invites us to think about the stories we tell. One can only hope that more of Yuzefovich’s work makes its way into English with all the speed and determination of the horsemen he chronicles.  — Yelena Furman, Los Angeles Review of Books

Without discarding realism, this finely counterpointed tale suggests that magic works only if one believes in it. The same can be said of fiction, and Leonid Yuzefovich’s writing certainly has what it takes to earn our trust.  — Anna Aslanyan, The Tl#A