New Book of Rustam Ibrahimbayov

he new book - Solar Plexus; A Baku Saga in Four Parts by a famous  screenplay writer and film director Rustam Ibrahimbayov will be released in English translation in July 2014 by Glagoslav publishing house. 

The author of Burnt by the Sun, Rustam Ibragimbekov, once nominated for presidential election in Azerbaijan by the country's opposition, now speaks up about the tragedy of a merciless and antagonizing period of Azerbaijan’s journey to independence. In his novel Solar Plexus: A Baku Saga in Four Parts, Ibragimbekov dissects history as seen through the eyes of his countrymen and tells a mesmerizing story of the rebirth of a nation.

Spanning three generations and stretching from the 1940s to the 1990s, the four distinct parts that make up Solar Plexus intertwine to tell the tale of a group of friends who grew-up around the same courtyard in Baku.  Each section is told from a different perspective as the friends’ passions, deceits, rivalries and disappointments play out against the shifting turmoil of those decades: from the Great Patriotic War and Stalin’s Purges, to the industrial institutes and Russification of the ’50s and ’60s, through to the struggle for independence and violence of the early ’90s.

The novel is equally a paean to Baku’s multiculturalism and a time when a person’s worth was measured by their qualities, not whether they had been born an Azeri, Russian, Jew or Armenian – a time brought to a violent end by the war with Armenia, when friends and neighbours were suddenly turned against one another, and broad-minded inclusion gave way to an exclusive and crude nationalism.

Rustam Ibragimbayov was born in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1939. He is an internationally renowned and multi-award winning screenwriter, dramatist and producer. He holds State awards for contributions to the arts from both Azerbaijan and Russia. His writing credits include more than 40 film and television scripts, plays and works of prose. Close to Eden (1993) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, a European Film Award for Best Film of the Year and was nominated for an Oscar. In 1994 Burnt by the Sun was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. A stage version of Burnt by the Sun, adapted by playwright and script writer Peter Flannery (Our Friends in the North, The Devil’s Whore) performed at the National Theatre in London in spring 2009.

Solar Plexus: A Baku Saga in Four Parts  has been translated into English by the acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield. -0-