Lost Believers

In 1970s Siberia, Galina, a promising young geologist from Moscow, is surveying for minerals from a helicopter, and her pilot, Snow Crane, is someone she is beginning to love. Hovering over a stretch of forest that should be empty, they spot a small hut and a garden. The next day, when they hike from their field camp to the hut, they find a family living there.

Agafia belongs to a family of Old Believers, a small sect of Christians who refused the reforms that reshaped the modern Russian Orthodox Church. Her parents had fled religious persecution four decades earlier and journeyed deep into the snowy wilderness to build a home far from a world they considered sinful. For Agafia, Galina and Snow Crane are the first outsiders she has ever met.

As the two women grow close, each begins to question a future that once seemed settled. Galina cannot escape the expectations of her Soviet upbringing, while Agafia's devotion gradually gives way to a deep appreciation for the harsh, unrelenting beauty of the taiga. Beneath their friendship, Galina comes to see that the mines she is helping to open threaten Agafia and her home, and that the same exploitation of the natural world is taking place across the Soviet Union.

This debut novel is inspired by true events. It explores faith, fate and freedom against the backdrop of everyday life in 1970s Soviet Russia.