The writer Marc Levy has decided to distribute his next novel, a fiction set in modern-day Ukraine, for free in Russian on the internet, his publisher said on Friday October 6. Robert Laffont Editions confirmed this information to AFP. “We will put the Russian text online at the end of October, free of charge. I tell myself that, if popular writers had told what Nazism was from 1933, some Germans might have seen things differently,” the author previously declared to the newspaper Le Monde.
The Symphony of Monsters, which appeared in French on October 17, recounts the disappearance of a child in Rykove, a village in southern Ukraine, about fifty kilometers from the border with Crimea, a Ukrainian region annexed by Russia in 2014.
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The plot takes a political turn when this boy’s mother and big sister explore the secrets hidden by the Russian army and its cronies.
Robert Laffont presents Marc Levy, 61, as “the most widely read French writer in the world, with more than 50 million copies sold and translations into 50 languages.” He told Le Monde all the sympathy he had for his Russian readers, of whom he has very good memories during his promotional trips to Moscow.
“A part of the Russian population is no longer able to think for itself. There is a form of passivity around Putin combined with fatalism which distresses and terrifies me. Children torn from their parents, I hope that this is a subject which definitively prohibits any possibility of excusing it,” he explained. The novel will also be translated into Ukrainian, published by Stary Lev editions.