The underground - Hamid Ismailov

'I am Moscow's underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town.' So begins the story of Mbobo, the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this captivating novel by exiled Uzbek author and BBC journalist Hamid Ismailov. Born to a Siberian woman and an African athlete who came to compete in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo must navigate the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed- raced boy in the shaky terrain of the Soviet Union before its collapse. The Underground was named one of 'the best Russian novels of the 21st Century' (Continent Magazine).