The Last Hiccup

A darkly funny, tragic, and ultimately heroic novel set in 1930s Russia, The Last Hiccup is the story of Vladimir, an eight-year-old boy stricken with a case of the hiccups that lasts over a decade. Put through a series of extraordinary, often bizarre treatments by a famous physician, Sergei Namestikov, Vlad is spirited away from his rural home and doting mother to a hospital in Moscow. But Sergei’s chief medical rival, the brilliant Alexander Afiniganov, believes that beneath Vladimir’s mirror-less eyes lurks a pure, unbridled evil, and Vlad is removed from polite society. Isolated from everyone and everything save his hiccups Vladimir grows up to find inner peace among the hiccupping. On his way back into the world he once knew, through a country now in the midst of war, he encounters many strange people and situations, and worries about what would happen to him should a cure for his now-comforting affliction be found.