Nicholas Bilanchuk vanished from the pages of Seven Signs of the Lion mid-crisis, and readers have waited since 2016 to learn what became of him. Now he returns: rising from the fountain in front of the Lviv Opera House, disoriented and only beginning to recover from a traumatic confrontation with forces well beyond the ordinary world.
To him, no more than a few minutes have passed. In reality, ten years have gone by.
Lviv, the city of lions, receives him as it always has: with its cafés and cobblestones, its opera house and its long, layered memory. Nicholas reconnects with old friends who had long assumed he was gone for good, and revisits the loves who shaped his earlier life. Then, at a classical music concert, he meets Andzhela, and something new begins.
The year is 2019. Neither Nicholas nor the city yet knows what 2022 will bring, and that quiet, doomed ordinariness gives the novel an ache its predecessor could not have carried. As Nicholas slowly draws strength from Lviv itself, fragments of the trauma that sent him away begin to surface, memories he has spent a decade, without knowing it, trying not to have. By the novel's end, he is offered something rare: a genuine gift, and a path toward healing.
The Eighth Sign of the Lion continues the story that Seven Signs of the Lion (Glagoslav, 2016) left open, while standing on its own as a novel of memory, love and recovered wholeness, set in one of Europe's most quietly enchanted cities. Michael M. Naydan, internationally recognized as one of the foremost translators of Ukrainian and Russian literature, here turns to fiction entirely his own.
