THE DEATH OF THE ARAL SEA

The Final Duty (2000) is a deeply realistic work – a
philosophical reflection on the vast and unfathom-
able tragedy of the Kazakh people: the death of the
Aral Sea. In this novel by Kazakh writer A. Nurpeisov,
the storms of a hard and tangled human fate unfold.
The sea recedes, the fish disappear, the shores are
emptied. Nature is deformed – and so are people’s
lives. There is a brutal clarity in this novel, a cold
irreversibility in its conclusions. Its ideas are etched as
sharply as the footprints in snow melted by day and
frozen by night.