Memoirs of addiction and incarceration arrive with a ready-made plot: fall, bottom, light. Publishers know how to sell that shape. Readers, many of them, have learned to distrust it.
Lost Generation is Sergei Šarašenidze's attempt to write the years that do not fit the shape. The title is not a literary in-joke. It is a claim about what a life can lose — time, people, a future that was supposed to be ordinary — and about a cohort of men and women who disappeared into systems that prefer them unspoken.
The book is 287 pages. That length matters. A pamphlet can do testimony. A memoir has to do time: the boredom of using, the bureaucracy of a sentence, the unglamorous labor of not picking the thing back up on a Tuesday.
If you have lived any of this, you already know the Hollywood version is a kind of violence. It turns a private war into a TED talk. Šarašenidze writes from the other direction: what it costs to stay in a body, in a family, in a country, after the worst years.
This site exists so the book can meet the people who need it without waiting for a review cycle to notice. Buy it, pass it, argue with it. The long road is not a metaphor if you are still on it.