One More Year: Press reviews

‘Sana Krasikov is a brilliant new writer. The stories of One More Year are populated by imperfect characters who always surprise, and who are gloriously brought to life with humor, sympathy, and unexpected tenderness.’

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

‘Krasikov is clever, funny, wry and poignant, with a lovely economy and precision of phrase that recalls not just Lorrie Moore but Flannery O’Connor and the great Raymonds, Carver and Chandler. This is not one of your quaint-exotic, highly flavoured set of emigrant-immigrant stories. With great tenderness Krasikov reminds us that the immigrant cannot leave their personality behind when they leave the old country; and, these days, the immigrant cannot leave their family, either. I can’t think when I’ve read a writer who has more effectively and subtly portrayed the relief and torture that the age of the cheap intercontinental phone call has brought. Krasikov’s account of the relationship between older people and young immigrants is telling. Her compassion extends to an understanding spread throughout these tales that you do not just immigrate from overseas; you immigrate from the past into the strange new land of the present.'

James Meek

‘The debut of a major literary voice shaped by the literary traditions of both America and Russia.’

Yiyun Li

‘Sana Krasikov, who moved with her family from Georgia to the US when she was eight, articulates like no other writer today the agonies and triumphs of eastern Europeans who have come to America looking for a new life … Krasikov's clear eye and economy of expression serve her purpose well, conveying whole lifetimes of grief and ambition in a few words. America - a country in the grip of a "fantasy of itself", as she puts it - needs more writers like her.’

Saturday Guardian

'Like Alice Munro, Krasikov seems to enjoy surrounding her protagonists with thickets of in-laws, offspring and ex-lovers. In the final story, "There Will Be No Fourth Rome", which returns its transplanted heroine to Moscow for a visit, there must be at least half a dozen interconnected pairings. Each of them contains, or seems to contain, a fully realised drama of marital imbalance, each extending the theme in a different direction, each modifying one's reading of all the others, the whole thing managed in under 50 pages, with a beautifully gloomy portrait of the city thrown in for good measure. Considering the density, it's a remarkably lucid accomplishment, and by engaging the reader so intimately with so much human life, it manages to rise to the kind of richly charged emotional climax one associates more with the ending of a long novel than a short story.'

Observer

‘[An] impressive debut collection … Krasikov has a rewarding subject in these tales of exile and emigration, of “an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent onto another”. Her stories suggest this entire world even when they focus on the small details of one person’s deracinated life. Her gift, like that of many of the best short-story writers, is to be able to hint at a larger narrative unfolding outside the confines of the tale she is telling. Past histories are filled out with a telling sentence or paragraph. Characters are given depth by a word or phrase.’

Sunday Times

‘What makes the collection so good is partly the fineness of detail – emotional as well as social and sensory. Story after story plays with the same set of variables, but always in different, vividly imagined situations, and always with unpredictable outcomes … Krasikov's powers of observation are acute, and always admirably aligned with the larger dramatic aim of the stories.’

Guardian

‘Ukrainian-born Krasikov’s gritty little narratives offer a melancholy vision of the life of a Russian emigré on the US East Coast.’

Five Rising Stars of the Short Story, The Times

‘Début collection of short stories focusing on the immigrant experience … The New Yorker has published four of her stories already.’

Bookseller

'Krasikov’s soft, steady voice describing terrible violence creates a quiet explosion, to stunning effect. Equally remarkable is her ability to set forth complications–prior marriages, children, pervasive devaluation of women, longing for love–in a way that enters us at once, and utterly convinces. . . Graceful and keen, these stories seep into memory not only for their unflinching gaze but also for their sane compassion. It is one thing (often a writer’s self-flattery) to present characters in complex distress as if they were specimens. It’s something else to stand alongside them, not with sentiment but with humility, with a kind of emotional and spiritual solidarity. Krasikov achieves this, and we’re larger for it.'

San Francisco Chronicle

‘[An] accomplished short story collection … Krasikov offers luminous insights and observations.’

Independent

‘Krasikov’s prose is precise, and her stories are intelligent, complex and passionate. A stunning debut.’

Publishers Weekly

'Her book is more cogent, as a collection with a point, than most... Ms. Krasikov’s short stories are some of the finest debut work to appear in recent years. Bitterness and martyrdom are the spice of these stories, and one of her characters, bewildered by the petty tit-for-tat around her, wonders: ‘Must every simple decency now be counted?’ But that kind of counting is precisely what makes a writer of manners superb.'

New York Sun

‘This auspicious debut by Ukrainian-born Krasikov includes some widely praised stories that previously appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Krasikov’s eight tales of immigration and cultural adjustment reveal a fine eye for the significant details of daily life, conveyed in unadorned but powerful prose.’

Angel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times

'An amazingly mature work for a young author. The eight stories herein are all shrewdly humane and formally exquisite. Initial readers of Drown and Interpreter of Maladies must have felt the shock of discovery after encountering those stellar debut collections. Well, now there’s a new kid on the block: Krasikov is as good as Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri were at this stage in their careers. . . One awaits Krasikov’s future work. If these stories are any indication, her name will become justifiably familiar.'

Miami Herald

'Krasikov imbues her writing with a tangible humanity that erases the otherness an unfamiliar culture so often breeds, and in the process makes us care about each one of her characters. Whether male or female, teenage or elderly, in chaotic modern Moscow or a bucolic New York City suburb, their stories feel immediate, urgent, and gratifyingly real.'

Entertainment Weekly

'They have extricated themselves from dead-end lives in their native Russia; now some of the emotional émigrés in Sana Krasikov’s stunning debut collection of stories are in America, trapped in makeshift jobs or marriages, and waiting, always waiting, for redemption. One More Year is an exploration of ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another,’ an atlas of continental drift.'

O, The Oprah Magazine

'One More Year riffs on the old story of the immigrant experience in America in a surprisingly fresh way… her story collection is consistently original.'

Time Out, New York

‘With One More Year, Krasikov has announced herself as an extraordinary new talent. This exceptional collection meets even the highest expectations.’

Lady

‘In these eight engaging short stories, the Ukraine-born author explores the tribulations of those who are fleeing or have fled Russia for a hoped-for better life in America; or those who are trying to return home … Sana Krasikov is adept at tracing the arc of characters' lives and fills these short spaces with large physical and psychological journeys … Her prose is cool and clipped and most effective when it lets its guard down to offer lucid insights into love and work.’

Independent on Sunday

‘[Sana Krasikov] is a sharp critic of many aspects of contemporary America, but also retains a ruthless eye for Russia’s failings … She is an author of wry, and at times dazzling, talent.’

John Thornhill, Financial Times

‘Elegant, impressive stories of exile in America.’

‘Culture’ section’s ‘Must Reads’ , Sunday Times

‘Engaging, subtle and sophisticated stories …Krasikov is a tremendous new talent.’

Francesca Segal, Jewish Chronicle

‘An exciting debut from an outstanding new writer.’

‘Summer Short Stories’ round-up, Waterstones’s Books Quarterly

'Krasikov affords her characters great dignity… this is a wonderful collection.’

Metro

‘A mature work of rare humanity – thought-provoking, readable and struck through with a sly charm.’

Ian Sinclair, Big Issue

‘Sana Krasikov announced herself as a serious talent with the border-spanning emotionally questing One More Year.’

Metro