The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (Chinghiz Aitmatov)

The novel follows one day of Burannyi Yedigei, who lives at a small railway halt on the Kazakh steppe and crosses the steppe to bury his friend in the ancestral cemetery, near a cosmodrome.

In an ancient legend told in the book, captives have wet camel hide bound to their heads until they lose their memory and become slaves — mankurts — who do not even recognise their own mothers.

Published in Novy Mir in 1980, it turned "mankurt" into a symbol of a person who has forgotten their roots, language and history, a word now used across the Turkic world.