“In the year Blank, when A-K was governor of the province of R, Good Tibo Krovic had been mayor of the town of Dot for almost twenty years.”
Andrew Nicholl’s debut begins with the withholding of details familiar to anyone who has ever read a 19th century Russian novel. Dot, the book’s setting, is part of a remote chain of islands in the northern Baltic at the mouth of the river Ampersand that so thwarted the mapping attempts of Catherine the Great’s team of surveyors that seven they “left in disgust” after seven years of effort. Read more…