"The Petrovs In and Around the Flu" is the second novel by writer Alexey Salnikov, awarded the critics' prize at the NOS Literary Prize (2017) and the National Bestseller prize (2018). The novel has been translated into several foreign languages.
In December 2007, on the eve of the New Year, 28-year-old auto mechanic Petrov comes down with the flu. His wife and elementary school-aged son soon fall ill as well. When their son is taken to the New Year's party at the Youth Theater, Petrov drifts into memories of his Soviet childhood—of how he held the hand of an icy Snow Maiden with an unnaturally white face. To the girl, Marina, who was playing the Snow Maiden, he seemed at that moment very similar to her lover Igor, by whom she was pregnant.
Igor is an irresistible trickster who links the worlds of the living and the dead. When he encounters the sick auto mechanic on public transport, the Petrovs' entire life is turned upside down, and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where reality ends and a flu-induced hallucination begins. Things that are completely unthinkable in everyday life begin to happen to them.
Author: Alexey Salnikov
Pages: 416 (typographic). Hardcover
Dimensions: 38x135x208 mm
