A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK 2023A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022On the Trans-Siberian Railway a desperate Russian conscript hopes a chance encounter with an older French woman will offer him a line of flight.Eastbound is richly atmospheric and full of suspense. It combines a vibrant account of one of the most magical train journeys in the world, the Trans-Siberian, with a narrative of a double escape, depicting an unlikely alliance of a French woman trying to leave her lover by travelling in the wrong direction, and a heartbreakingly young Russian draft dodger. It takes a great writer to manage all that so convincingly in hundred and twenty thrilling pages." – Vesna Goldsworthy, author of Iron Curtain'A balance of internal thought and external action propelled by a narrative that races on in long sentences, keeping things flowing beautifully in between moments of drama.' - The Guardian'Using unadorned prose, de Kerangal repeatedly constructs anxious moments which defy any sense of inevitability or conclusion' – Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times'Eastbound is a novella told in a single breath, quick as a light turned on; intense, precise, unconditional, potent. Jessica Moore's translation is masterful.' — Anne Michaels'As a choreographer knows, if you place a man and a woman on the stage even in an abstract ballet, you already have a story. As Maylis de Kerangal, one of the three or four best French novelists working today, reveals, the story need not be one of physical desire but of shared loneliness and the longing for escape—and of mammalian empathy' — Edmund White'Wonderfully immersive prose, relentlessly propulsive as the movement of a train but rhythmically dipping into and out of her characters' perspective, worldview, psychology.' — Jonathan Gibbs (on Twitter)

Eastbound was developed from a radio commission, written whilst the author was travelling on the Trans-Siberian from Novossibirsk to Vladivostok, as part of the French Ministry of Culture's programme of French-Russian events in 2010. It was inspired by the author's observations on the ground. Published in France two years after her award-winning novel Birth of a Bridge (2010), this novella maps the fast-paced story of two fugitives on the Trans-Siberian railway, where a desperate Russian conscript hopes a chance encounter with a French woman will offer him an escape. Infused with a sense of surreal softness, and in prose evoking jazz music, the filthy, violent circumstances of Aliocha's journey are brought into sharp focus. Maylis de Kerangal traces an intersection between Russian classics and pressing contemporary political questions. Eastbound revives the Russian literary archetype of the rebel soldier and the reality of disempowerment the author witnessed at the Soldiers' Mothers o