Vita Nostra: A Novel (Vita Nostra, 1)

“Vita Nostra” — a cross between Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” and Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian” [...] is the anti-Harry Potter you didn’t know you wanted.” -- The Washington Post
“Vita Nostra has become a powerful influence on my own writing. It’s a book that has the potential to become a modern classic of its genre, and I couldn’t be more excited to see it get the global audience in English it so richly deserves.” -- Lev Grossman
Best Books of November 2018 -- Paste Magazine
The definitive English language translation of the internationally acclaimed Russian novel—a brilliant dark fantasy combining psychological suspense, enchantment, and terror that makes us consider human existence in a fresh and provocative way.
Our life is brief . . .
Sasha Samokhina has been accepted to the Institute of Special Technologies.
Or, more precisely, she’s been chosen.
Situated in a tiny village, she finds the students are bizarre, and the curriculum even more so. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, it is their families that pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of . . . and suddenly all she could ever want.
A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Russian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction—brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey—is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Max Barry’s Lexicon, and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport them to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.\nAmazon.com Review\nIf Hogwarts was in Russia instead of Great Britain, if failing your O.W.L. exam meant death to family members, and if learning how to bend reality might deform your brain and physical body…well, Harry Potter wouldn't make it past year one.
Vita Nostra, a Russian urban fantasy novel, audaciously expands the concept of magic and philosophy well past their current comfortable doctrines. The strenuous, stressful lessons that Sasha Samokhina assimilates at the Institute of Special Technologies forces Sasha and her classmates to rethink their assumptions and break past mental barriers—even when the barrier is simply identifying as human. Reading
Vita Nostra exposes just how complacent novels about magic have become as they evoke the tried-and-true magical systems based on inherited abilities, willpower, or enchanted items. As Sasha expands her vision of the world, so, too, the reader's vision of fantasy literature expands.
Vita Nostra’s ending doesn't have the tidy satisfaction I expect…but perhaps that reveals how pigeonholed some of my own reading expectations continue to be.
—Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review