Pravda

November 26, 2007
Docx’s second novel (after The Calligrapher
) wrings out all the theatrics to be had from unhappy urban-dwelling twins, their sexually voracious father and dead Russian mother. Twins Gabriel and Isabella Glover, both 32 and leading lackluster lives—she at a New York PR firm, he the editor in London of Self-Help!
magazine—see another crack form in their perennially tortured existences when their mother, Maria, who defected to marry their British father, dies alone in St. Petersburg. (Their despised father, Nicholas, meanwhile, dabbles in art, decadence and self-important interior monologues in Paris.) All are unaware of an additional family member: Arkady Artamenkov, their mother’s first son, who had been kept afloat by Maria’s financial assistance and the guiding hand of his junkie friend, Henry Whey. After the checks stop, Henry hatches a plan to send Arkady to plead for money from the family that doesn’t know he exists. Though Docx’s prose can get dangerously overheated (“Give me the sincerity of nakedness and the honesty of desire, O God, and deliver me from the turgid bourgeoisie and all their favorite phrases”), the crushing atmosphere will draw in fans of dark Euro-fiction.

January 15, 2008
A young Englishman finds his mother dead in her apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia, and there begins the unfolding of a saga based on the author's family history. His writing supercharged with high-voltage prose, Docx ("The Calligrapher") drives his characters from New York to London to St. Petersburg in a relentless search for the truththe "pravda" of the title. When the twins Isabella and Gabriel Glover attend the funeral of their Russian-born mother, Maria, in the former Russian capital, they are unaware that their lives are about to become forever intertwined with that of a lone Russian piano student Arkady Artamenkov. In their subsequent peregrinations, the twins discover unbelievable family secrets that make them question their very relationship to their closest kin. Though Docx's prose veers out of control at timesit is both well written and well overwrittenhe manages to elevate this most dysfunctional family to the level of international intrigue. Caustic, hip, and highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 9/15/07.]Edward B. Cone, New York

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2008
In this densely detailednovel about identity and secrets, Docx (The Calligrapher, 2003) proves himself an astuteobserver of place as the novel movesbetween three continents. When Maria Glover is found dead in her apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia, her twins, Isabella and Gabriel, bury their mother in her beloved Russian hometown and struggle to come to grips with their loss, finding that they are stillunable toreach outto their father, a promiscuous art collector from whom theyve long been estranged. The familys tangled relationships heat up when its learned that their mother gave birth long ago to an illegitimate child. Raised in orphanages and desperately poor, though hes a gifted musician, Arkady viewslife as one long struggle, while his steadfast friend, an idealisticdrug addict, determines to give his own life some meaning by helping Arkady track down his biological family. Although Docxdisplays an engagingly acerbic humorGabriels work for the trendy magazine Self-Helpyields some truly diabolical riffs on popular culturethis is, in the main, a dark and anguished look at thetoxicity of family relationships.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)