About the book
New Year 1988/89: The holidays in Kiev reunite a drama student, a taxi driver, a thief, and their kin. Their country—the USSR—is thawing and splintering as new hopes meet violent consequences in these fragile lives.
About the author
Joseph Howse is a writer, scientist, beekeeper, and orchardist. He and his cats dwell in a fishing village in Nova Scotia, Canada. The Circus and the Atom is the sequel to Howse’s debut novel, The Girl in the Water (Nummist Media, 2022). Together, they form the start of a multigenerational saga called Next Year’s Snow. The series so far has won the Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction (2023 and 2026), the IAN Awards for Outstanding Multicultural Fiction (2023), and the Best of Novel prize in the Sunspot Literary Journal Solar Flare Contest (2025). Howse’s books also include Molly Cats in Lamplight (The Poetry Lighthouse Press, 2026), a forthcoming collection of his award-winning poetry.
EXTRACT
I: Conscience and the Bayonet
1: Richard II’s Gulag Far From Africa
Silently, Nadia was rehearsing her lines on “apricocks” as she gazed at one of the faces among twenty million dead.
There, in the second-floor foyer outside the Lilac Room and the snack bar, the rotation of mourners stood four ranks deep. They lapped around the folding walls, a full storey high and covered in foamboard plaques, where previous visitors had pinned photographs, letters, typewritten biographies, even tear-off sheets. Had anyone met this man—perhaps shared his sentence or been his executioner? Contact the relative here—or tell the newspapers; they were printing the most impolitic confessions these days.
Further back, the traffic and wintry ventilation flowed more freely. Cavernous, ornately plastered, and dripping with chandeliers—these were the qualities of the venerable theatre and erstwhile TV studio, which in recent years had become the capital’s nonconformist art house, the Palace of Culture of the Moscow Electric Bulb Factory.
Nadia’s roommate, Annika, was shivering and straying from wall to wall and clasping her hands, fingers to wrists, in front of her belly. This solemn gesture reminded Nadia of her brother-in-law, Giorgi, or perhaps of his native mountains; she had seen women from the Caucasus do the same in antique photos as they posed, devoid of joy, in damask dresses.
I must be some kind of sadist, to drag Annika out on this November night, to see those who froze in nameless camps, when she is missing Africa. Well, even I can’t spend every night with Shakespeare and I can’t let Annika think the weather alone is the worst thing about this country. Oh, mercy, though. Tonight, I could even be glad to smoke and drink with Giorgi. I’d be Nastya’s gladdest kitchen helper and I’d wolf her schmancy meals. I’d gladly camp out in Daniilushka’s bed and read him tales and calm his fuss while his Mama and Papa keep trying to pen Act II. I think Chernobyl made Giorgi sterile.
“So what are you thinking?” Annika whispered, in English, as she swept in near Nadia’s cheek. She had tea and honey on her breath, which seeped into the general fog of the draughty room. Even the press of live, tearful bodies could not warm it up. “About my family,” Nadia answered. (They switched to Russian.) “About your grandparents?” “Partly.”
Annika nodded and looked at the picture on the wall, as if to offer attention and sympathy to this forgotten man, somebody else’s murdered grandfather. She, like Nadia, was no stranger to the concept of murdered grandfathers.
Annika asked, “Okay, will you visit your Gramma for New Year’s?” Will we visit her, you mean. Their professors had as much as told them that Annika should stick with Nadia and go meet the heroic Gramma Ninel. The sooner the better, they had seemed to say. Notwithstanding the history of Gramma’s heroism, she inhabited an increasingly volatile part of the Union, where concerts were protests with attendance in the hundreds of thousands. Just a week ago, the wavering appointees in Estonia’s Supreme Soviet had declared some sort of sovereignty, stopping short of independence, and this tuneless prelude reassured no one.
At any rate, New Year’s Eve would fall on the Saturday between the end of classes and the start of the exam session. The same date was also Nadia’s birthday, her nineteenth, but she preferred to keep quiet about that.
Nadia shrugged and studied the toes of everyone’s boots as she shuffled away from the wall. Slush. A painter or a general could maybe love this slush. “My sister…” …ought to be a painter or a general… “…wants me at hers instead.” “So do half and half, if we don’t have early exams.” “That would make four days on the train—four days, four nights.”
Nadia tried the doors to the Lilac Room and, as nothing barred her, she popped in to view the stained-glass harlequins, the burgundy curtains, and the plaster of the delicate, eponymous hue.
This evening, the Lilac Room doubled as an armoury of camera gear in the care of a photographer’s assistant. He had clamped a pair of curtains over a table to make a tent. When he was not cleaning lenses by sconce light, he changed rolls of film in the tent—all in the vein of his duty: to ready the spares.
This gofer pretended to ignore the girls whilst he stole a couple of shots of them with the harlequins. Clack, dial-dial. Clack.
Nadia continued, “Somebody has just got to wait, at least till exams are over. What if Mama and Papa can’t make it to Nastya’s? Then it’s four days, six nights if I go to them. I can’t go to Nastya and not see Mama and Papa…” …and maybe Mama’s friend, while he’s in port. “Go, soon as you can. You’re not a tree.” “Aren’t I? I’ll send them each a graft of me.” Nadia half-covered her face and, with a cluck, mimed the act of snipping off her nose. “Here’s one with a good, round bud, like an apricot shoot should have.”
Annika shook her head.
“Trust me,” Nadia added. “A friend of mine knows all about fruit trees…” …and knives… “…and what to do with them.” “Time spent with you is an education, dear Nadia.” Annika studied the harlequins. One wore a cape and floppy hat; he was singing and playing the guitar. Another wore a doublet and bicorne; he was reaching for a lady’s wrist. She was twisting on the dance floor in her mask and feathered cap and cleavage-baring gown, as orange and billowy as a wild poppy. Above them was a stained-glass word which Annika struggled to read, crafted as it was in imitation of old, churchy handwriting. “What does it say?” “Uh, ‘little playhouse’, you could say, like a little stage clowns would set up in the street.” Nadia nodded and, in her mind, loosely translated Blok’s poem about this sort of stagecraft:
Suddenly a wet clown
contorts to the footlights,
wailing, “Save me!
I’m bleeding out my last
cranberry juice!
Annika nodded back. Together, she and Nadia returned to the foyer. “Are you sure,” Annika asked as she took a last, sweeping look at the high photos, “nothing will come of this, of us being here?” Nadia shrugged and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Okay, come, Nadia,” Annika puffed, “let’s get back where we have our blankets and hot drinks. Then I can help you with your English
gardener and you can help me with my Russian nanny.” “You need to learn patience with our winter. Chekhov says so, sort of.” Annika linked arms with Nadia. “Yes? We’ll teach each other patience. You start with your four days, six nights, in some combination.” Nadia sighed into the fog.
The Circus and the Atom is published by Nummit Media. Extract provided by Janine Daniels (J Doubled Publicity).
