Understanding Russia
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Sign up todayThe Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Narrator
Cassandra Campbell
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Translator
Brom
Length
12 hours
Language
English
A. Hu-li, beautiful and curiously foxlike, has the appearance of a luscious fourteen-year-old girl, the mind of a sly Buddhist monk, and an endearing habit of name-dropping all the famous people she's met over the past two thousand years. She works as a classy prostitute in Moscow's premier hotels, until one client goes inexplicably and fatally berserk at the sight of her and she has to leave in a hurry. Forced to advertise on the Internet, she comes to the attention of an intelligence officer who also happens to be a werewolf.
Victor Pelevin's new work of fiction is both a supernatural love story and an outrageously funny satirical portrait of modern Russia. With all his characteristic humor and metaphysical ambition, Pelevin introduces us to an unforgettable cast of perverts, former KGB agents, oil tycoons, and amorous werewolves.
Victor Pelevin is the author of A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, The Life of Insects, Omon Ra, The Yellow Arrow, and The Blue Lantern, a collection of short stories that won the Russian “Little Booker” Prize. His novel Buddha’s Little Finger was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He was named by the New Yorker as one of the best European writers under thirty-five and by the Observer newspaper in London as one of “twenty-one writers to watch for the twenty-first century.”
Cassandra Campbell is a prolific audiobook narrator with more than 700 titles to her credit. A 2018 inductee in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame, she has won four Audie Awards, has been nominated for a dozen more, and has consistently been an AudioFile Magazine Best Narrator as well as a Publisher’s Weekly Best Narrator of the Year. She has also performed in and directed dozens of plays at theaters across the country.
Brom has, over the past decades, lent his distinctive vision to all facets of the creative industries, from novels and games to comics and film. Along with The Child Thief, he is the author of the award-winning illustrated horror novels The Plucker and The Devil’s Rose. He is currently kept in a dank cellar somewhere just outside of Seattle.
Reviews
“Absurdist, satirical, irredeemably hyperactive, Victor Pelevin is one of Russia’s cult authors…His prose fizzes with a mishmash of Classical philosophy, Buddhism and western metaphysics, myth, anecdote, self-referentiality—and wisecracks.”
“Full of tour de force passages…it has the ring of truth, the same truth as books before it by Gogol, Goncharov, Bulgakov, Zamyatin—men who looked with satiric sympathy into the Russian soul and wrote brilliant, heartbroken, funny fables about what they found there.”
“Strange, frenetic and beguiling…Pelevin [is] one of the most exciting writers to emerge from new Russia.”
“Pelevin aficionados will glide joyously into the postmodernity of this supernatural love affair, which fuses philosophical discourse with lascivious and semantic game-playing. There’s plenty of intellectual fun here, from the sport of hunting English aristocrats to the idea of howling a demonic plea into the night to summon oil from a near-spent field.”
“Equal parts biting satire on neo-Russian consumerism, drug-fueled muckabout, sci-fi adventure, love story, literary in-joke and mystico-shamanic treatise on the nature of enlightenment. Disruptive, transporting and very funny, it’s one of his best.”
“An outrageously enjoyable, uniquely mind-blowing and transformational literary experience. A truly liberating read.”
“[An] unusual and thoughtful contemporary fantasy…Cassandra Campbell deftly inhabits the character of the sensual, cynical, playful, and lonely A. Hu-Li as she seeks enlightenment and unexpectedly finds love with a werewolf. Campbell also makes a wonderfully subtle point; her narration and conversations with other werefoxes are spoken in an American accent, but her dialogue to other Russians is delivered in a Russian accent, indicating that A. Hu-Li’s true self remains hidden from the outside world.”
“Thought-provoking and philosophical…A commentary on modern Russian culture, spiced with Buddhist theology, wrapped in an urban fantasy.”
“The novel holds our interest with unpredictable twists and turns, leaving us stunned, puzzled, and asking for more.”
“This complex, subtle allegorical tale demands a subtle, layered performance. Campbell delivers, freighting her reading with the hint of double (or even triple) meanings, smoothly transitioning between reality, fantasy and various in-between states. She reads with precise diction and moderate inflection—realizing, perhaps, that overdoing the verbal performance would undercut the subtleties of the prose…Campbell’s performance is definitely top drawer.”
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