Natasha Pulley's books have such a solid grip on my psyche... and to think it was only a few weeks ago that I first knew of her! So excited to read this early copy of her latest release and rediscover joy.

rep: Russian cast, gay mc with ptsd, achillean litw: murder (off-page), medical experiments on humans, cancer, animal death, implied torture, panic attacks3.5 ☆natasha did it again. a mystery book with a ridiculous setting which is actually a romance book that punches u straight in the heartbut also, it's a very weird experience to read sth based in soviet russia when ur a slav. there are all those scenes clearly written to be shocking, which have been glaringly obvious to u from pages before. a...

i think pulley tricked me into attending a chemistry lesson. “if i look sad, it’s because this is the happiest i’ve been for years, and you did that, but you aren’t even one tenth mine and you never will be.” i- HOWLS✼ thank you to bloomsbury for sending me an arc of the half life of valery k in exchange for an honest reviewnatasha pulley has such a solid grip on my stupid mortal being i no longer know what to do with myself. i asked how to sell my soul for an advanced copy of one of my most a...

another home run from our gal Natty P

I have no idea what this is about, but I'm gonna add it in the hope it lives up to The Bedlam Stacks.

4 1/2 stars.I've been trying to figure out how to review this novel for days now. I have a pretty strong background in Russian history, both Soviet and not, and so I kind of feel like I shouldn't have been surprised by anything in this book, but I was. I was gutted, my heart was shredded, I kept saying, "no!" aloud, to the story on the page, not least because Pulley draws her story from true events. Not least because my reading of Soviet history and the genocide perpetrated against the Russian p...

natasha pulley has me by the throat.. as soon as she announced pre-orders on this i was on the waterstones website

Thank you to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for the ARC.2.5/5 stars. This is a tough one to rate, as I really enjoyed the historical setting, but did not care one bit about the plot or characters, despite the book's vehement attempts.I would categorize this book as historical fiction, not science fiction - it's a "what if" in a historical event without any some advanced technology or anything. I guess technically it's science-y given the focus on radiation.The first half of the story was interesting,

A NEW TITLE COMING BY NATASHA *screeeeeaaaams*

Valery Kolkhanov is six years into a ten-year sentence at a Soviet gulag when he is transferred to work at a lab at the mysterious City 40: a small city in the middle of an irradiated marsh, home to five nuclear reactors and a thousand secrets. Conditions at City 40 are infinitely better than the gulag, but there’s something very wrong going on at City 40: rumors about a strange explosion six years ago, radiation charts that bear no correlation with reality, and an intentional lack of radiation

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARCContent Warnings: (view spoiler)[Nazis - in particular Josef Mengele makes a brief appearanceHuman ExperimentationAnimal ExperimentationImplied group rapeSome homophobia - including random use of a homophobic slurCheating Cancer, childhood cancer (hide spoiler)]Natasha Pulley's latest is a difficult novel to classify – maybe historical thriller with elements of MM romance. The setting is the aftermath of a real historical incident - the 1957 Kyshtym disaster, a nuc...

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC to review. I was thrilled to get a copy of Natalie Pulley’s most recent book as I’ve read all her others and love her writing and her fascinating choice of plots based on unusual, hard-to- believe events of the past. This time we begin in the gulag of Siberia in minus 60 degrees with Valery and his pet rat Boris, where he communicates with other ‘Zeks’ (political prisoners) by code knocking on wood. Valery is a scientist rounded up as one of millions in the US...

Thank you Netgalley for providing the e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest reviewThis book is one of my most anticipated reads of 2022, because The Kingdoms was my favorite book of 2021. And it exceeds my expectation in the best way.The Half Life of Valery K reads like a historical sci-fi mystery/thriller, except that the science are all legitimate. And there's a queer romance underlying the adventure, which makes everything a hundred times happier and more heartbreaking at the same time...

Unhappily stating that this was a very disappointing read to me. Despite what seems like a lot of research done on a pretty grey and traumatic chapter of Soviet history, there are some glaring mistakes that could have been so easily picked up by a Ru sensitivity reader… seriously, in this day and age, why are we still publishing books that don’t understand how patronymics work? Or the fact that it’s simply impossible that anyone in the Soviet Union wouldn’t know of Sverdlovsk… this and many othe...

On my blog. Rep: gay mc with ptsd, Soviet Central Asian achillean liCWs: animal death, implied torture, panic attacksGalley provided by publisherThe Half Life of Valery K is an odd book because, on finishing it, I was full of the usual Pulley-related feelings. And then I thought about it more.It’s one of those awkward ones where I did still like the book, but it has parts which I disliked on a spectrum ranging from slightly to intensely. And I never thought this would be something I’d say abo

Absolutely deranged book. More thoughts later

Ladies and gentlemen, my lads, my bros: Natasha Pulley has done it AGAIN

With everything going on with Russia at the moment I did slightly struggle at the beginning with this novel however Pulley has done it again with another excellent novel that is going to be on my best books of the year. The Half Life of Valery K is more thriller-like than I have seen from Pulley before with less magical realism. And yet this book is so compelling that once I was invested in the story I really struggled to put it down. I really loved Valery as a protagonist and thought Pulley did...