What is the best Russian-language novel of the 2000s?

Prize-winning literary heavyweights share the shelf with dystopian satires, cult favourites and mass-market bestsellers. Pick the novel from that decade that still talks back.

1. 1
   Day of the Oprichnik

   Vladimir Sorokin's 2006 dystopian satire of a neo-medieval Russian police state, told over one day in a guardsman's life.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Asan

   Vladimir Makanin's 2008 Big Book-winning novel about a Russian officer trading fuel in the Chechen war.
   999pts
3. 3
   Matisse

   Alexander Ilichevsky's 2006 novel about a physicist who drops out of society to wander Moscow's margins, Booker winner of 2007.
   945pts
4. 4
   Maidenhair

   Mikhail Shishkin's 2005 polyphonic novel, built around an interpreter for Russian asylum seekers in Switzerland, winner of the Big Book prize.
   862pts
5. 5
   The Heart of Parma

   Alexei Ivanov's 2003 historical epic about the conquest of the Ural wilderness in the 15th century.
   764pts
6. 6
   Sankya

   Zakhar Prilepin's 2006 novel about a young radical in a provincial Russian revolutionary movement.
   764pts
7. 7
   Metro 2033

   Dmitry Glukhovsky's 2005 post-apocalyptic novel set in the Moscow Metro that became a global franchise.
   764pts
8. 8
   Empire V

   Victor Pelevin's 2006 satire in which a Moscow youth is turned into a vampire feeding on money and glamour.
   647pts
9. 9
   Duhless

   Sergey Minaev's 2006 bestselling satire of Moscow's cocaine-fuelled corporate elite.
   647pts
10. 10
    The Kukotsky Enigma

    Lyudmila Ulitskaya's 2001 Russian Booker-winning family saga about a Soviet gynecologist and his household.
    647pts
11. 11
    Ice

    Vladimir Sorokin's 2002 novel about a cult that awakens 'hearts' with hammers of Tunguska ice, the core of his Ice Trilogy.
    646pts
12. 12
    The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

    Victor Pelevin's 2004 novel narrated by a two-thousand-year-old fox spirit working as a Moscow prostitute.
    503pts
13. 13
    The Librarian

    Mikhail Elizarov's 2007 Booker-winning novel about rival cults fighting over the magic books of a forgotten Soviet writer.
    503pts
14. 14
    2017

    Olga Slavnikova's 2006 Russian Booker-winning novel about Ural gem hunters on the eve of a revolution's centenary.
    503pts
15. 15
    Voltairians and Voltairiennes

    Vasily Aksyonov's playful 2004 historical novel about Voltaire and Catherine the Great, winner of the Russian Booker.
    503pts
16. 16
    The Slynx

    Tatyana Tolstaya's 2000 post-apocalyptic novel about a scribe in a mutated Moscow where books are forbidden.
    503pts
17. 17
    On the Sunny Side of the Street

    Dina Rubina's 2006 novel about a mother and daughter in wartime and postwar Tashkent.
    503pts
18. 18
    The Gray House

    Mariam Petrosyan's 2009 cult novel about a boarding school for disabled children with its own hidden laws and myths.
    0pts
19. 19
    The Yeltyshevs

    Roman Senchin's bleak 2009 novel about a family's slow collapse after moving to a dying Siberian village.
    0pts
20. 20
    The Taking of Izmail

    Mikhail Shishkin's dense, many-voiced 2000 novel that won the Russian Booker Prize.
    0pts
21. 21
    Daniel Stein, Interpreter

    Lyudmila Ulitskaya's 2006 documentary-style novel about a Jewish wartime interpreter turned Catholic priest, Big Book winner.
    0pts

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