"In this swirling, gripping tale, a young Russian conscript and a French woman come together in a crowded compartment of the Trans-Siberian railroad, each of them fleeing to the east for their own reasons"--

Maylis de Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including The Heart, which was one of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and won awards including the Wellcome Book Prize, the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama; Naissance d'un pont (published in English as Birth of a Bridge), which won of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Mend the Living was Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2016.

Jessica Moore is a poet, translator, author, and singer-songwriter. A former Lannan writer-in-residence and winner of a PEN America Translation Award for her translation of Turkana Boy, by Jean-François Beauchemin, her first collection of poems, Everything, now, was published in 2012. She lives in Toronto.