British publishers Gollancz are set to release Russian novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky‘s book, Metro 2033, in February 2010.
From Wikipedia:
Dmitry A. Glukhovsky (Russian: Дмитрий Глуховский, born July 12, 1979) is a Russian author and journalist. Glukhovsky started in 2002 by publishing his first novel, Metro 2033, on his own website and granted a free access to all the readers. The novel has later become an interactive experiment, drawing in thousands of readers. Glukhovsky is famous in Russia with his bestselling novels Metro 2034 and “It’s Getting Darker”. He is also an author of a series of satirical “Stories of Motherland” criticizing today’s Russia.
As journalist, Dmitry Glukhovsky has worked for EuroNews TV in France, Deutsche Welle, and RT. In 2008-2009 he worked as a radio host of a Mayak Radio Station. He writes columns for Harper’s Bazaar, l’Officiel and Playboy.
He has lived in Israel, Germany and France and speaks English, French, German, Hebrew and Spanish as well as his native Russian.
About the book:
The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend.
More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. Rusted railways lead into emptiness. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man’s time is over.
A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. They live in the Moscow Metro – the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity’s last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters – or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct – the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price.
VDNKh is the northernmost inhabited station on its line. It was one of the Metro’s best stations and still remains secure. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared. Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. He holds the future of his native station in his hands, the whole Metro – and maybe the whole of humanity.
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