Lost Believers: A Novel

Summary

“A beautiful, mournful novel about faith gravely tempered by grief and the brutal iron of modernity bringing the greatest of losses. Zhorov’s voice is fresh and appealing.” —Joy Williams, author of The Visiting Privilege and Harrow

A rich, immersive debut novel, inspired by true events, about a meeting between two women in 1970s Soviet Russia—a deeply religious homesteader living in isolation with her family on the Siberian taiga and an ambitious scientist—that irrevocably alters the course of both of their lives.

Galina, a promising young geologist from Moscow, is falling in love with her pilot, Snow Crane, on an expedition for minerals in Siberia. As their helicopter hovers over what should be a stretch of uninhabited forest, they see a small hut and a garden—and, the following day, when they hike from their field camp to the hut, they find a family.

Agafia was born in Siberia into a family of Old Believers, a small sect of Christians who rejected the reforms that shaped the modern Russian Orthodox church. Her parents, fleeing religious persecution four decades earlier, journeyed deep into the snowy wilderness, eventually building a home far away from the dangerous and sinful world. Galina and Snow Crane are the first people she has ever met outside of her immediate household. As the two women develop a friendship, each becomes conflicted about futures that once seemed certain and find themselves straining against their past: Galina can’t shake the confines of her Soviet upbringing, and Agafia’s focus drifts from her faith to the beauty of the relentlessly harsh taiga. Underneath it all, Galina begins to see how her work opening mines threatens both Agafia and her home, and mirrors the exploitation of the natural world happening across the Soviet Union.

A vivid and illuminating novel about faith, fate, and freedom against the backdrop of 1970s Soviet life, Lost Believers is an unforgettable journey.