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Shop nowThe Gray House
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Learn more“The Gray House is enigmatic and fantastical, comic and postmodern…Rowling meets Rushdie via Tartt…Nothing short of life-changing.” —The Guardian
The Gray House is an astounding tale of how what others understand as liabilities can be leveraged into strengths.
Bound to wheelchairs and dependent on prosthetic limbs, the physically disabled students living in the House are overlooked by the Outsides. Not that it matters to anyone living in the House, a hulking old structure that its residents know is alive. From the corridors and crawl spaces to the classrooms and dorms, the House is full of tribes, tinctures, scared teachers, and laws—all seen and understood through a prismatic array of teenagers’ eyes.
But student deaths and mounting pressure from the Outsides put the time-defying order of the House in danger. As the tribe leaders struggle to maintain power, they defer to the awesome power of the House, attempting to make it through days and nights that pass in ways that clocks and watches cannot record.
A Read Russia Prize Finalist.
Mariam Petrosyan was born in 1969 in Yerevan, Armenia. In 1989 she graduated with a degree in applied arts and worked in the animation department of Armenfilm movie studio. In 1992 she moved to Moscow to work at Soyuzmultfilm studio, then returned to Yerevan in 1995.
The Gray House is Petrosyan’s debut novel. After working on it for eighteen years, she published it in Russia in 2009, and it became an instant bestseller, winning several of the year’s top literary awards, including the Russian Prize for the best book by a Russian author living abroad. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Lithuanian.
In interviews Petrosyan frequently says that readers should not expect another book from her, since, for her, The Gray House is not merely a book but a world she knew and could visit, and she doesn’t know another one.
Petrosyan is married to Armenian artist Artashes Stamboltsyan. They have two children.
Reviews
“Beginning with a straightforward, realistic style, Ms. Petrosyan slowly and carefully leads the reader step by step through suspension of belief to the House’s inner workings, which manifest in increasingly fluid sentences and offbeat vocabulary…its intended audience will savor each page and flip right back to the beginning after finishing. Hats off, then, to Mariam Petrosyan for a surreal ride through an unconventional universe.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Rich with startling details and vivid world building...the intellectually and emotionally rewarding conclusion confirms this fantasy novel’s undeniable power”—Publishers Weekly
“Petrosyan’s prose is wildly imaginative and beautifully wrought, overflowing in Machkasov’s translation with rich sensory details that combine with an offbeat sense of humor to form a fully realized world. This dense, heady tale should be enjoyed by seasoned readers of literary fiction and magical realism…An impressive—and impressively massive—feat of imagination and translation.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The Gray House is enigmatic and fantastical, comic and postmodern, flawed but brilliant, with elements of multiple genres—Rowling meets Rushdie via Tartt…To its most ardent fans, a spell in Petrosyan’s mysterious house is nothing short of life-changing.” —The Guardian
“Yuri Machkasov’s translation is a Herculean feat.…Machkasov has captured the novel’s poetic richness.” —The Guardian
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