A powerful and poignant novel in letters about teenage loneliness that digs into the weight of family trauma.
This coming-of-age epistolary novel follows an introverted teenager Serafim who lives in a small town in the North of Russia, where labour camps used to be. Most people who live there now are descendants of either imprisoners or military men. Serafim doesn’t get along with his school friends, and he is not very close with his parents. They are musicians: his father plays in a military orchestra and sings in a church choir, while his mother is a piano teacher. He pretends to go to school but instead, he just stays at home. That’s how he discovers a new online app called To Nowhere – a service for anonymous correspondence. He writes a letter to nowhere without expecting an answer, but to his surprise, he gets a reply from a girl Sonya who has just moved to Israel with her parents for treatment and who also feels very lonely. As they start exchanging emails quite regularly, their communication gets deeper and deeper. When Serafim’s parents learn about him skipping school, they discover his correspondence with Sonya: it turns out that Serafim wrote all these letters himself as such an app simply doesn’t exist! This aggravates the already broken relations between Serafim’s parents. With Serafim taken to the hospital, the novel ends with a letter from Sonya – she wonders why Serafim has stopped answering her…
PRIZES 2021 Shortlisted for Albus Corvus Publishing House literary contest
KEY SELLING POINTS
The novel explores such acute social issues as mental health, parental drinking, street violence, police power abuse, and military hazing.
The first-person point of view allows for intense emotions.
An unexpected plot twist.
A therapeutic story about the power of music.
Written in a letter format, it will appeal to the fans of The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
YA Age: 14+ Pages: 200 Size: 145*200 mm Published in 2022 by Albus Corvus
