The Rehearsals

New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play Christ. They are persecuted, arrested, displaced, and ultimately replaced by their own children. Yet the rehearsals continue... A stunning reflection on art, history, religion and national identity, Rehearsals is the seminal work in the unique oeuvre of Vladimir Sharov, Russian Booker Prize winner (2014) and author of Before & During (Read Russia award for best translation, 2015). 'The clarity and directness of Sharov's prose - wonderfully rendered by Oliver Ready - are disconcerting, almost hallucinatory. His writing is at times funny, at times so piercingly moving, so brimful of unassuaged sorrow, that it causes a double-take. How did I get here? is a question his reader will likely ask again and again.' Rachel Polonsky, New York Review of Books '… the reader is rewarded with an unforgettable experience. Not because Vladimir Sharov forsakes the intellectual heft of these early pages, but because he finds a more accessible vehicle for his profound thinking in an intriguing premiss.' Jamie Rann in the Times Literary Supplement