Of Sturgeon and Carrie Bradshaw

<p><strong>A KIRKUS GET IT SELECTION • BOOKLIFE EDITOR'S PICK</strong></p><p><strong>A darkly comic tale of collapse and reinvention. - BookLife</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>Dmitry is unemployed living in a crumbling apartment in Irkutsk and his most stable relationship is with a malfunctioning satellite TV that insists on airing <em>Sex and the City</em>.</strong></p><p></p><p>A decade ago he had a future-and a woman named Yuliana. Now he has a persistent sense of irrelevance and a military-veteran friend named Bogdan who reeks of vodka-spiked kombucha.</p><p></p><p>When Yuliana resurfaces Dmitry is jolted out of his carefully maintained inertia. But Moscow is far money is scarce and hope-if that's what this is-comes at a price. To finance the journey he joins Bogdan in a plan that is equal parts lucrative and ill-advised: illegally poaching sturgeon on the frozen edges of Lake Baikal.</p><p></p><p>What follows is less a scheme than a slow unraveling-into black-market dealings fractured loyalties and a growing inability to tell whether Dmitry is chasing Yuliana or simply rewriting his past into something more tolerable. Somewhere along the way Carrie Bradshaw becomes part of the equation.</p><p></p><p><strong><em>Of Sturgeon and Carrie Bradshaw</em></strong> is a darkly comic novel about failure longing and the quiet persistent delusion that life might still be rearranged into something meaningful.</p><p></p><p><strong>PERFECT FOR READERS OF:</strong></p><ul><li><strong>Gary Shteyngart</strong> (<em>Absurdistan</em>)</li><li><strong>Elif Batuman</strong> (<em>The Idiot</em>)</li><li><strong>Ottessa Moshfegh</strong> (<em>My Year of Rest and Relaxation</em>)</li></ul><p></p>