The novel I planned for three years, and started to write in May, 2022, during the Russian invasion. It was published in small daily chunks on the Substack mailing list, every day May 1—Dec 1, 2022.

The novel is complete, and currently I am looking for the publisher (or, alternatively, contemplating self-publishing). The Substack (where separate fragment and the whole end result in Epub format are available) is made private after the novel was finished, but you might request to subscribe while I haven’t decided on its fate.

Here’s an annotation I am sending to literary agents:

The novel follows a group of survivors of a catastrophic event that destroyed the rest of the world on their journey through the Crimean peninsula in the early 2000s.

The apocalypse happened in 2003, and the only known survivors are several people on vacation on the Crimean peninsula. They were young, confused, and weird. They grew up in a strange country, which at times felt post-apocalyptic even before what happened, happened. Still, they were full of life, love, and tenderness to each other and the world as they remember it, and they took the impossible post-apocalyptic road of wonders and horrors towards the most beautiful city in the world.

A free-spirited, witty IT girl who became an involuntary leader of the group. A book translator dedicated to understanding every woman’s personal language. Two teenage twins who answered to the same name and continued to stay together even after one of them died. A child who could talk to cats. Meek, plump girl who once worked as a massage therapist and would become more important for the story than anybody could imagine. All of them and several others were set in motion by a mysterious, inhuman voice, which never told them the goal, only the destination: Yalta.

They followed the path, hoping to learn what happened to the world – or, at least, how to live with it. Some of them died on the road (but that didn’t stop them from going further), some turned into trees, some found a new purpose. All that’s left is their notes about the travel and each other, scribbled on the backs of 213 photographs and gathered by an unnamed ‘translator’.

A couple of fragments: