Since Ninety-One

About the book

What is owed to
the record

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama asked whether history had ended. By 1991 the question mark was gone.

Since Ninety-One is a novel about the thirty-four years that followed, about the people who believed the answer, administered it, profited by it, and are now living in the part nobody described. It is a book about influence and its machinery: think tanks, corridors, framework agreements, the vocabulary that makes retreat sound like responsibility.

The hope of 1991 was real. Something genuinely ended when the Soviet Union fell: the permanent threat of annihilation, the division of Europe into opposing camps, the sense that the world was locked in a contest between two irreconcilable ideas. What replaced it felt like an opening. Thirty years later, with a war on European soil and the institutions of that opening under sustained pressure, the question is no longer whether history ended. It is what happened to the people who were inside the room when the terms were set.

Five of them appear here. A correspondent who writes it down from a hole in the frozen ground of the Donetsk Oblast. An official in Kyiv who files it for later. A historian in Russia who buried it and finally retrieves it. An American investor on a terrace in Miami who mistakes it for opportunity. And a Russian across the table from him who turns all of it into leverage.

They are all telling their truth. That is the difficulty.

The novel asks what truth means in a world where the record is controlled, corrected, and selectively released: where bearing witness is not a passive act but a contested one, and where writing it down, accurately, in enough copies, may be the only argument that survives. It is a novel for the post-truth era, and it does not offer a verdict. It keeps the record instead.