Next Year's Snow
About this ebook series
What do we dream as the permafrost melts away?
Nadia, a bookish Soviet girl, comes from an ethnically and philosophically mixed family of war heroes, would-be artists, nobodies, and crooks. Her plan to escape into academia becomes shaky as she finds herself unable to ignore the disintegration of her society and disappearance of her friends.
Ida, a misbegotten “stoic clown”, comes and goes from institutions as she works on her plan to break the system, strike it rich, get smart, and be free.
Their ties to two families underpin this series of connected novels examining innocence, experience, oppression, and choice in a fractured modern world.
The debut, The Girl in the Water, has won the 2023 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction and 2023 IAN Awards for Outstanding Multicultural Fiction.
The sequel, The Circus and the Atom, has won the Best of Novel prize in the 2025 Sunspot Literary Journal Solar Flare Contest.
The series will also include a prequel, Ninel, and two further sequels, Vladimir and I and The Painter at War.
“Joseph Howse evokes the literary styles of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.” —Rob Errera, IndieReader
