The Opening of Sea Fever

I am so excited about the upcoming publication of my fourth and latest novel Sea Fever, scheduled for a late September release. I want to share with my readers this thrilling and unique story set in the Central Asian country Kazakhstan, which is like a sleeping giant that has wakened from the grips of the USSR since the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. For the next while, I shall be posting an extract here and there from the novel, to incite curiosity. Here's the beginning...

1991

To Ayan Kazbekov and the world, August 23, 1991 might well have made all the difference. As he drove his secondhand Zhiguli in the direction of his apartment, he knew nothing of the surprise visitor who awaited him that everning, nor the secrets their meeting would lead him to -- secrets that might shake the world and change its course. That afternoon, Ayan left his office at the Institute of International Languages in Moscow for the last time, having cleared out his desk and shelves and packed two boxes of books to take home -- to Kazakhstan and the Central Asian steppe, in the far reaches of the USSR. Looking back one last time at the office that had been his daytime quarters for the past six years, he felt that same heaviness in his chest as he had the first time he left his hometown of Aralsk by the Aral Sea fourteen years earlier. He had taken the 2,400 kilometer train journey to Moscow to attend university. Perhaps this time the anxiety of separation was more acute, for he could not foresee a reason to return to Moscow again in the predictable future, not with the disintegration of the USSR looming in the near distance.