Solar Plexus

From the Academy award winning screenplay writer of Burnt by the Sun Solar Plexus is a compelling saga of family and friendship love and betrayal set against the backdrop of Azerbaijans rapidly-changing capital Baku as the country struggles with the transition into a post-Soviet world... Spanning three generations and stretching from the 1940s to the 1990s the four distinct parts that make up Solar Plexus intertwine to tell the tale of a group of friends who grew-up around the same courtyard in Baku. Each section is told from a different perspective as the friends passions deceits rivalries and disappointments play out against the shifting turmoil of those decades: from the Great Patriotic War and Stalins Purges to the industrial institutes and Russification of the 50s and 60s through to the struggle for independence and violence of the early 90s. The lives of Alik Marat Lucky Eldar and Seidzade are realised with rare insight and a superb eye for the bigger picture but also with humour and a recognition of lifes absurdity that recalls writers from Bulgakov to Kundera. Ibragimbekov evokes a world of passion and honour of proud men and hot-headed women of great tenderness and complex humanity where the truth is always just one of many truths. The novel is equally a paean to the multiculturalism of Baku and a time when a persons worth was measured by their qualities not whether they had been born an Azeri Russian Jew or Armenian - a time brought to a violent end by the war with Armenia when friends and neighbours were suddenly turned against one another and broad-minded inclusion gave way to an exclusive and crude nationalism. Translated from Russian by Andrew Bromfield