What did the disintegration of the Soviet Union feel like for the people who lived through it? Award-winning writer Sasha Salzmann tells this story in a remarkable novel about two women in extraordinary times As a child, Lena longs to pick hazelnuts in the woods with her grandmother. Instead, she is raised to be a good socialist: sent to Pioneer summer camps where she's taught to worship Lenin and sing songs in praise of the glorious Soviet Union. But perestroika is coming. Lena's corner of the USSR is now Ukraine, and corruption and patronage are the only ways to get by - to secure a place at university, an apartment, treatment for a sick baby. For Tatjana, the shock of the new means the first McDonald's in the Soviet Union and certified foreign whisky, but no food in the shops; it means terrible choices about how to love. Eventually both women must decide whether to stay or to emigrate, but the trauma they carry is handed down to their daughters, who struggle to make sense of their own identities. Glorious People is a vivid depiction of how the collapse of the Soviet Union reverberated through the lives of ordinary people. Engrossing, rich in detail and unforgettable characters, this is a captivating love letter to mothers and daughters.

"[Salzmann] writes in a broad, timelessly epic style. There is a quiet sovereignty here that gives one great hope that we are reading one of the next great German storytellers" - Süddeutsche Zeitung

"A brilliant book... [that] vibrates with the pleasure of narrating" - Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"Not only a sobering portrait of the late Soviet era, but also a remarkable family novel that draws on the experiences of loss made by strong female characters ... An award-worthy book" - SWR2

"Convincing in its intense and richly pictorial language, offers a different version of the narrative, a perspective beyond clichés and what has been read hundreds of times before" - neues deutschland

"Rarely has there been such a comprehensive and personal vivid description of how the end of the USSR continues to affect people to this day" - der Freitag

"The sensually concrete language, which does justice to the abundance of impressions and feelings at all times, is worthy of praise. Unconventional, allegorically charged images recur and make an impression" - Der Tagesspiegel

"An exciting look beyond our borders towards the East and back, by an award-winning author" - Brigitte Woman

"Glorious People [is] impressive sensitive and unsparing" - Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung

"This is a novel about mothers and daughters - from the 1970s to the near present - and stretching from the corrupt hospitals and semi-legal whisky stores of small-town Ukraine to the queer scene in Berlin . . . a capacious novel . . . certainly not short on vibrancy and humour" - TLS