<b>Named one of “the best Russian novels of the 21st Century,” <i>The Underground</i> is the unforgettable story of an abandoned mixed-race boy navigating the wondrous and terrifying city of Moscow before the Soviet Union’s collapse.</b><br><br>“I am Moscow’s underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town.” So begins the story of Mbobo, the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this captivating novel by exiled Uzbek author and BBC journalist Hamid Ismailov. Born to a Siberian woman and an African athlete who came to compete in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo must navigate the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the shaky terrain of the Soviet Union before its collapse.<br><br>With echoes of Ralph Ellison’s <i>Invisible Man</i> and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Ismailov’s novel tackles head-on the problems of race and the relationship between the individual and society in a thoroughly modern context. While paying homage to great Russian authors of the past—Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, Nabokov, and Pushkin—Ismailov emerges as a master of a new kind of Russian writing that revels in the sordid reality and diversity of the country today. Named one of “the best Russian novels of the 21st Century&quot; (<i>Continent Magazine</i>), <i>The Underground</i> is a dizzying and moving tour of the Soviet capital, on the surface and beneath, before its colossal fall.