The extraordinary new novel by the author of Untraceable. A sealed shaft in a Donbas coal mine contains unimaginable horror: layer upon layer of human bodies, the victims of Red and White terror during the Revolution, of Stalin's purges, of the Einsatzgruppen in the Holocaust. Around this infamous pit, in a polluted region convulsed once again by war and cruelty when Russia invades Ukraine, the fates of four characters intertwine: a mysterious and powerful laundress whose dedication to cleaning the filth created by the mine attracts the suspicion of the secret police; her innocent daughter Zhanna, left alone by her mother's death; a brutal Russian militia man, who targets Zhanna; and his boss, a former KGB man turned ruthless servant of Putin. The voice of The Engineer, a murdered Jew who designed and constructed the mine, is a witness to the bloody history of the region and the terrible secret at its heart. A haunting, lyrical meditation on the legacy of dictatorship and atrocity.

Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist and journalist. His novels have been translated into many languages and received great acclaim in the English-speaking world. The New York Review of Books has hailed Lebedev as 'the best of Russia's younger generation of writers'.