In Memory of Memory (shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021)

With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.

In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag and Osip Mandelstam, IN MEMORY OF MEMORY is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms - essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents - Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

'Maria Stepanova is one of Russia's most influential cultural figures ... In Memory of Memory is the story of three generations of her family told through the preserved and remembered artifacts of their lives - the tale of people whose greatest achievement was simply to survive the perilous 20th century.' --- The Moscow Times