The first in D. M. Thomas’s sequence of novels about Soviet Russia, the beginning of the journey into unstable traffic between politics, memory, improvisation, and desire.

Here history is something half-composed, where private obsession and public catastrophe keep bleeding into each other, altering perception. There is something precarious about the novel’s whole method — high-wire, feverish, slightly off-balance in an intentional way. 

It reads like a Cold War dream threaded through with erotic tension, intellectual restlessness, and the sense that both art and history are always one misstep away from collapse. Pretty suited, frankly, to a book called Ararat, named after Armenia's mountain, the site where Noah's Ark allegedly rested. 

1984 Abacus / Sphere Books paperback edition, with the novel first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz in 1983. Nice period copy, in good condition.