Description: "A truly thrilling postmodern thriller...Ice succeeds brilliantly as both a thriller and a cautionary tale about totalitarianism, bigotry, elitism, and fundamentalism. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries and as a much-needed antidote to the Left Behind books." -Library Journal "Russian postmodernist Sorokin's English-language debut combines imaginative audacity and stylistic virtuosity in a work that defies categorization. The first section has the staccato pacing of hard-boiled pulp fiction, and it's about as subtle as the hammer to the human chest that opens the breathlessly paced narrative. A secret Russian sect is attempting to "awaken" the hearts of those who might qualify as kindred spirits. They must be blonde-haired and blue-eyed. When they are struck in the chest with a hammer made of ice, which later reveals its peculiar interstellar properties, they are likely to lose consciousness in the brain while gaining consciousness in the heart, which murmurs the new name of the blessed one. If there is no murmur, the body can be discarded as an empty vessel; those who awaken discover a heart-to-heart connection that is like the wordless bliss of extended orgasm. The second section offers a backstory narrated in a very different voice. Fourteen-year-old Varya Samsikova describes her removal from the Russian countryside and transportation to Nazi Germany, the original home of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed master race. In Germany, Varya becomes one of the "awakened," learns about their origins and returns to her native Russia in search of kindred spirits. There she ultimately suffers from totalitarian persecution that suggests the Soviet Union has plenty in common with the nation that was so recently its enemy in World War II. Varya's account extends from her teenage war experiences through the dismantling of the Soviet Union. The novel culminates in two much shorter sections that flash forward to a future when the ice has become a self-administered instrument ofboth spiritual salvation and entertainment, the next step beyond the digital revolution. Its adherents make some strange claims, but not much stranger than those associated with Scientology or est. A page-turner with provocative implications."--Kirkus "Blond, blue-eyed contemporary Muscovites are being kidnapped, driven to remote areas and bashed in the chest with hammers that have ice-block heads; the victims are being 'cracked' by their assailants, who want to free their hearts to 'speak'literally. The 'empties' (those whose hearts are silent) are left to die; the others (whose hearts spontaneously utter a word or two in the 23-word 'heart language') are recognized by their assailants as fellow 'heart speakers'a Lapin, Nikolaeva and Borenboimare instructed by Khram, the mentor of Russia's heart speakers, in the tenets of their new life, in which they love one another and hammer humans to achieve the apocalypse. Khram herself was 'hammered' by a German S.S. officer in a WWII slave labor camp, and in a long flashback, she returns to Stalin's Russia to secure the Siberian ice needed for hammering and to exploit the gulag for heart speakers through mass murder. In stripped down, poker-faced prose, Sorokin registers a world in which the inhumanity of man to man is exploited by a murderous emerging race who are, by contrast, in sweet mutual harmony with one another. This is aMaster and Margaritafor the age ofBuffy the Vampire Slayer." -Publishers Weekly "Sorokin's worksare, or should be, landmarks of international postmodern fiction."The New York Review of Books "notoriousHe writes stories i

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