Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Ulitskaya, Phillips, Zentner, Savage, and More

Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of Ludmila Ulitskaya, Helen Phillips, Alexi Zentner, Lila Savage, and more—that are publishing this week.

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Jacob’s Ladder by Ludmila Ulitskaya (translated by Polly Gannon)

Here’s what  about : “Ulitskaya () travels through a century of tangled Russian family history in this lucid saga. Nora Ossietzky, upon the death of her grandmother, discovers a trunk filled with letters and diaries from the 1900s and 1940s that belonged to her grandfather Jacob. As Nora sifts through these writings, readers travel through some of the most turbulent times in Russian and Ukrainian history: the Jewish pogroms, WWI, prerevolutionary times, the horrific Stalin era, and Jacob’s arrests and time in the gulags. Nora unravels these strands of family history while moving through the threads of her own life: her childhood with a remote father, her failed and unconventional marriage, the birth of her son, his later drug addiction, her career and fame in the theatrical world of Moscow, and the birth of her grandchild, Jacob, named after his great-great-grandfather. In the tradition of and , Ulitskaya’s complicated work covers a century of Russian history, politics, economics, culture, and music, which can be overwhelming. But there is