A visceral, stirring novel following a queer literature student traveling across Russia with her estranged father, a long haul truck driver secretly dying of AIDS, from the acclaimed author of Wound A decade after her father walks out on her family, the narrator of Steppe, now a literature student, decides to spend some time with him on the road as he makes deliveries across the vast plains of Russia. She's attracted and repulsed by his rugged life as a trucker, eager to reckon with the ways he's imprinted on her, to understand the person who made her, to witness their family likenesses. But the prematurely aged, drug-ruined man secretly being consumed by AIDS who meets her at the train station has little revelation to offer her yearning heart. As he drives her across a severe landscape in his freight truck, the narrator reflects on her father's role as a small piece of the extensive, violent patriarchal structure of Russian society and the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. Always