The Final Duty (2000) is a deeply realistic work – a philosophical reflection on the vast and unfathomable 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.
