The Underground

""I am Moscow's underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town." So declares Mbobo, the unforgettable twelve-year-old narrator of this captivating novel by exiled Uzbek author and BBC journalist Hamid Ismailov. Born to a Siberian woman and an African athlete competing in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo spends his days navigating the subterranean arteries of the Metro and the challenges of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the precarious days of the collapse of the Soviet Union" --Page 4 of cover.