Steppe
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 20, 2026
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- $14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A visceral, stirring novel following a queer literature student traveling across Russia with her estranged father, a long haul truck driver secretly dying of AIDS, from the acclaimed author of Wound
A decade after her father walks out on her family, the narrator of Steppe, now a literature student, goes on the road with him as he makes deliveries across the vast plains of Russia. She’s both drawn to and repulsed by his rugged life as a trucker, eager to understand the person who made her.
But the prematurely aged, embittered man secretly being consumed by AIDS who meets her at the train station has little revelation to offer her yearning heart. As he drives her across desolate landscapes in his freight truck, the narrator tugs on the few threads that make him her family, and reflects on her father’s small role in Russia’s violent patriarchal structure and the chaos and depravity of the post-Soviet 1990s. Always humming in the background, the austere beauty and mercurial nature of the steppe reminds her of the contradictions at the heart of their relationship—both natural and forced, intimate and alienated.
Oksana Vasyakina’s second novel pierces the surface of human relations and reaches into the depths of shame, longing, and grief that lie beneath. In simple, precise prose, she paints a vivid portrait of estrangement and situates it in the broader context of her country’s attempts to reckon with its troubled history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this compassionate and clear-eyed character study, Vasyakina (Wound) traces the bond between a rough-hewn Siberian truck driver and his queer daughter. The unnamed narrator reunites with her father in 2010 on a long haul across Russia. During the drive, her father expresses approval for her decision to study at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow ("Gorky had been a bosyak, a vagabond, like everyone else in my father's orbit and like my father himself"). She's happy to have his blessing but chafes at the terms ("Seeing myself as a bosyachka was embarrassing; I was ashamed of my poverty, my rootlessness"). On the drive, she reflects on her father's previous career in organized crime, when his stint running moonshine during the Gorbachev administration landed him in prison. Over the course of the nonlinear narrative, the reader gathers that the father has since died from AIDS, and that he was hiding his illness from the narrator during their trip. Vasyakina assembles a thoughtful and necessarily incomplete portrait of the father from the narrator's musings on the harshness and violence of the post-Soviet era that shaped him. It's a satisfying examination of how well a father and daughter can know one another.
