"A decade after her father walks out on her family, the narrator of Steppe, now a literature student, decides to spend some time with him on the road as he makes deliveries across the vast plains of Russia. She's intrigued and repulsed by his rugged life as a trucker, eager to witness their family likenesses. But the prematurely aged, embittered man secretly being consumed by AIDS who meets her at the train station has little revelation to offer her yearning heart. As he drives her across a severe landscape in his freight truck, the narrator reflects on her father's role as a small piece of the extensive, violent patriarchal structure of Russian society and the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s"-- Provided by publisher.