Ludmila Ulitskaya may well be my favourite contemporary Russian writer. Just the Plague is powerful in its literary construction and moral clarity, not to mention its contemporary parallels
- Gary Shteyngart,
A voice of moral authority for differently minded Russians, and one of Russia's most famous writers
- Masha Gessen,
A great Russian novelist
Le Monde
One of the greatest living Russian writers
- Gary Shteyngart,
Ulitskaya captures the shape-shifting nature of epidemics, and the way they acquire meaning backwards... the questions the book raises about authoritarianism and contagion-control remain bitingly relevant
Economist
Unsettling... Ulitskaya's language is as stark as the situations she describes, but she adds colour to an otherwise monochrome palate with outlandish, almost farcical vignettes... This English translation of Just the Plague is [...] to be welcomed for bringing a courageous Russian author and her humanitarian concerns to a wider audience
Lunate
Just the Plague serves as both a time capsule from a world where the possibility of a global pandemic was the stuff of fiction, and a sprightly parable concerning the infectiousness of ideology and dogma
New Internationalist
Ulitskaya has a vivid cinematic imagination... [a] masterly balance of the ominous and absurd
TLS
