“A dazzling study of mental anguish and moral dilemma” Author Nick Taussig picks his essential crime fiction reads… The Big Issue, 7 August 2013 1. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky Following the nihilistic student Raskolnikov, this is a dazzling study of mental anguish and moral dilemma. 2. The Godfather, Mario Puzo We’ve all seen […]
Category archives: Fiction
Independent – Five-minute memoir: Nick Taussig recalls a particularly trying trip across Russia
‘Mother Russia’ had long intrigued the author, but a journey across the country almost changed his mind… The Independent, 3 August 2013 A lifelong student of Russian literature – no one wrestles with the shadow self quite like a Russian novelist – it was perhaps inevitable that I would write a novel profoundly Russian in […]
4 stars in The Sun for The Distinguished Assassin
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevskii
Man is a wolf to man, according to The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov. He has no inclination to be good, but is weak and rebellious. He cannot escape from the compulsion of logic. He is doomed to self-destruct through the assertion of his will. His quest for harmony is futile, unless he […]
Why I wrote The Distinguished Assassin
As a postgraduate student of Russian literature at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 1995, I will never forget my first encounter with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a staggering work that powerfully, and methodically, documents the vast network of forced labour camps that existed throughout the former Soviet Union. What […]
What constitutes a really great work of fiction?
We have all done it, set down eagerly to read a new book and come away disappointed after the first few pages. It is not easy to create a gripping tale, but when an author gets it right, the result is priceless. This got me thinking about the characteristics that are actually found in a […]
The Distinguished Assassin, Second Extract
29th December ‘52 At Kirovskaya, Natasha stands on the escalator as it descends into the bowels of Moscow. She recalls how just over a week ago, on 21st December, she and a few other work colleagues had to celebrate Comrade Stalin’s birthday, there something obscene about this. For though the majority of people know that […]
Don Don, Chapter 2
I opened my eyes at three o’clock in the morning as the temple bell tower sounded: I always woke at the same time. I no longer required the gong to wake me; rather I simply used it as a prompt to bring me from sleep back into awareness, into the present moment. I sat up, […]
Don Don, Chapter 1
There was me at my table in Bucci’s, new Italian on Lexington up near the Chrysler Building, been there about a year and I liked it a lot. Got tired of that place on Sixth and Sullivan, great fuckin Bruschette but not much else, with one of those third generation Italians who thought he was […]
Love and Mayhem, from Chapter 3
The bus he gets on is packed. He scans the bottom deck for an empty seat, then goes upstairs. As he reaches the top, he glances round and spots a vacant aisle seat two from the back. He sits down and almost immediately finds himself drifting into warm reflections about his time with Catherine in […]