Based on real events in a surreal Soviet city, and told with Natasha Pulley’s inimitable style, The Rust Country is a sweeping new adventure for readers of Stuart Turton and Sarah Gailey.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from the second chapter of The Half Life of Valery K, which is out July 26th 2022!
In 1963, in a Siberian gulag, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to survive: the right connections to the guards for access to food and cigarettes, the right pair of warm boots to avoid frostbite, and the right attitude toward the small pleasures of life so he won’t go insane. But on one ordinary day, all that changes: Valery’s university mentor steps in and sweeps Valery from the frozen prison camp to a mysterious unnamed town that houses a set of nuclear reactors and is surrounded by a forest so damaged it looks like the trees have rusted from within.
In City 40, Valery is Dr. Kolkhanov once more, and he’s expected to serve out his prison term studying the effect of radiation on local animals. But as Valery begins his work, he is struck by the questions his research raises: why is there so much radiation in this area? What, exactly, is being hidden from the thousands who live in the town? And if he keeps looking for answers, will he live to serve out his sentence?
Sverdlovsk was an ugly industrial city. Outside the airport, it was so warm that there was a misty rain glinting on the steps and the lamp posts and the bonnets of the taxis. There was no need for a coat, even. He was staring at the film of water moving under someone’s windscreen wipers when the KGB lady hailed a taxi and put him in it.
Immediately Valery was enfolded in the glorious smell of hot leather and vodka, and what must have been a dab of furniture polish inside the heater. He moved along the back seat to leave room, but she didn’t get in; she was going to Moscow. Valery twisted round, taken completely by surprise. Wherever he was going, it wasn’t standard practice for the KGB to just leave a prisoner alone with a random cab driver.
Again, he wanted to ask what was going on; but if she slammed his fingers in the door, his bones would turn to powder.
She shut the door and thumped on the roof. The driver set off.
Maybe the driver wasn’t just a cab driver. But none of the doors were locked. Valery could just hop out at the traffic lights. There was a set at red outside the airport. He could get out, and walk off. Perhaps the driver would be able to shoot him, but perhaps not. He touched the door handle, his fingertips aching with potential. get out and go where, with no money and no other clothes? It was warmer here than Siberia, but that still wasn’t warm. Sleeping outside would be dangerous. But maybe that would be better than wherever he was going now. He couldn’t think properly. It was a shock. He’d wondered this morning – Jesus Christ, only this morning – how much of his mind had dissolved lately, but he hadn’t known it was this bad. He felt paralysed.
The lights changed. The driver sped away. He was one of those people who plainly felt that the accelerator should be untouched or floored. Then they were going at forty kilo metres an hour, and jumping out would have broken every bone in Valery’s body.
Valery scraped up some courage. There was no sign of a gun. It was possible the man wasn’t KgB. ‘Where are we going?’ he tried.
‘Can’t tell you yet,’ said the driver, not in an unfriendly way. ‘Settle in, it’ll be an hour or so.’
Valery nodded slowly. There were no more traffic lights. The steel giants that were the Sverdlovsk factories glided by, and soon the car passed the city limits. After that, it was only miles of arrow-straight road, punctuated every so often by more factory towns whose white tower blocks and grid streets looked like they’d all come from identical prefabricated kits. The thrum of the taxi engine was lulling, and he fell half-asleep, his head resting against the window. There was a vodka bottle on the front passenger seat, already three-quarters empty. It made a talkative sloshing sound whenever they went over a bump in the road.
He woke up because the taxi had accelerated. It pressed him back into the seat, and then slung him forward as the driver changed gear. Confused, he looked behind them, then jumped when the driver snapped his fingers at him. The man didn’t speak, but he pointed to a sign coming up fast now.
ATTENTION: DO NOT STOP FOR THE FOLLOWING 30KM. PROCEED AT THE FASTEST POSSIBLE SPEED FOR YOUR VEHICLE.
They shot past it at eighty kilometres an hour.
‘Because of the poison in the ground,’ the driver said.
Valery didn’t know what to say to that.
Coming up on their left now were the skeletons of burnt-out houses. The roofs were just blackened sticks, and all that was left of the structures were the stone chimneys. Chimney after chimney, set at angles to each other. The houses would have been wide-spaced, with big gardens – for crops maybe, and animals. grass and weeds grasped at the ruins. in another few years, they would cover them, and nobody passing by would know what the oddly shaped hillocks had been.
‘It was a bomb,’ the driver told him. ‘You know, an atom bomb, from the Americans. Destroyed everything. All one night. Boom.’
Valery looked up. ‘This damage is too widespread for a bomb.’
‘Why are the houses burnt, then?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said unhappily. On the right, a blasted church soared by, scraps of gold still winking on its broken domes. Beyond it was an old brick factory, the rafters poking through the roof like ribs.
‘I’m telling you. Bomb.’ The driver made a bomb noise and opened his hand to sketch a mushroom cloud. ‘Yup. We’re coming into proper rust country now.’
Valery wondered what that meant.
