2022/33: The Half Life of Valery K -- Natasha Pulley

2022/33: The Half Life of Valery K -- Natasha Pulley

... he had nothing to say. People made conversation by asking after your family, or home, or your last job, of if you'd been watching the ice hockey; he couldn't speak to any of that. He didn't mind, but it was awkward to have to say, actually I was starving to death last week and I had a rat called Boris.
He hoped someone was looking after Boris. [loc. 654]

It's 1963, and Valery Kolkhanov, formerly an esteemed physicist, has been a prisoner in a Siberian gulag for six years. Abruptly, he's told that he's being moved: he'll be working out the rest of his sentence as a prisoner-scientist at the Lighthouse, seventeen hundred kilometres from Moscow, where his old university lecturer Anna Resovskaya is leading research into the effect of radiation on the local ecology. It's all quite safe, Moscow -- in the person of KGB operative Shenkov -- assures Valery. But Valery is not convinced.

Quite a departure from Pulley's earlier novels, in that there is nothing of the supernatural or mystical here. Instead, The Half Life of Valery K is based on actual events in the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s. There are some familiar themes: people turned monstrous by circumstance; queer romance; a delightful octopus (this one is named Albert). I didn't love Valery K the way I immediately loved The Kingdoms, but I am looking forward to reading it again in advance of a fuller review near publication day.

Review copy provided by Netgalley. UK Publication Date 23rd June 2022.