Ambassador of the Dead

by Askold Melnyczuk

Overview

A harrowing tale of ambitions gone awry, and an unflinching meditation on exile and assimilation and the cost of love.

One Sunday morning, Nick Blud, a successful Boston physician, is home in bed when he receives a phone call from Adriana Kruk, the mother of a boyhood friend. The beautiful Adriana, who once vacationed at her family's luxurious summer home on the Black Sea, now lives in a run-down apartment in New Jersey. Abandoned by her husband and estranged from her sons, she summons Nick back to his old neighborhood, where something unspeakable has happened—exactly what, no one is willing to say.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582432519
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	06/20/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Askold Melnyczuk's publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. Among his works are the novels What Is Told, Ambassador of the Dead, House of Widows, and Excerpt from Smedley's Secret Guide to World Literature.

Table of Contents

	A Family of Kruks	1
	The Disappearing Sickness	37
	The Ambassador of the Dead	107
	The Woman Who Defeated Stalin	191
	The Invisible World	253

What People are Saying About This

Barry Hannah

....Fresh and stunning. I loved it.

James Carroll

....an extraordinary novel, passionately and intelligently written.
— (James Carroll, author of Constantine's Sword)

Ha Jin

....an extraordinary novel, passionately and intelligently written.
— (Ha Jin, author of Waiting)

Editorial Reviews

In Askold Melnyczuk, Ukrainian America has at last produced its eloquent champion...a novelist of uncommon grace and power.
— Newsday

Dan Cryer

....skillfully demonstrates how the violence and mysticism of the Old World re-enact themselves as psychological disease and self-destruction in the New.
— The New York Times Book Review

Jeffrey Eugenides

In Askold Melnyczuk, Ukrainian America has produced its eloquent champion [and] a novelist of uncommon grace and power.

Newsday

Melnycuk's writing aches with realism, but is also imbued with a hazy sense of wonder. The result: a novel so precise and understated, it's stunning.

Esquire

In Ambassador of the Dead, Askold Melnyczuk has created the most haunting, vividly drawn characters of any recent fiction, a major novel that crosses boundaries between a ghost nation and New Jersey, between the heartless century just past and the timelessness of love, grief, and hope.

James Carroll

Here's another American immigration story, an exquisite, original one, still asking those vexing American questions.
— Washington Post

Carolyn See

Melnyczuk writes exceedingly well-controlled miniature narratives...Recollections that might have fizzled in another's hands here grow luminous and haunting.

Publishers Weekly

...a glorious gem...sustained, powerful, lamentable, and moving.

Kirkus Review