Author

MIRO NES

I write fiction built out of documents. I live in Borský Mikuláš, in western Slovakia. KHAMAR-DABAN is my first book.

01The book

Cover of KHAMAR-DABAN: A Novel by Miro Nes

KHAMAR-DABAN: A Novel

Literary fiction · Historical fiction · about 82,000 words · Published 25 September 2026

In August 1993 seven hikers walked into the Khamar-Daban range above Lake Baikal. Six of them died on a bare plateau in a single day. The seventh was seventeen years old, and she came down from the mountain alone.

This novel goes down off that ridge with her, and then follows the paperwork that came after: helicopter hours nobody can pay for, a control date entered in ink, a folder with a lace tie. It is not a mystery with a solution. A cause of death was written down in 1993 and has been argued about ever since.

Every name and every document in these pages is invented. What is on the record is set down at the end of the book.

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02What happened on the Khamar-Daban

The event is real. In the English-speaking world it is known almost entirely from video: it has been told and retold by people with large audiences, and watched by millions.

1993August, the Khamar-Daban range, south of Lake Baikal
6 of 7members of the group died over the hours of a single day
18.7 Mviews of English-language videos about the event
33years since, and the cause of death is still argued about

Audience figures measured September 2026 across fourteen English-language videos

On the real people. The survivor of the 1993 group is a living person who did not ask for any of this attention. She is not named in the novel, and she is not named here. The book does not draw on her private life: the novel’s heroine, and the life she has after 1993, are fiction. Every character and every document in the novel is invented; the author's note at the end of the book sets out exactly what is on the record and what is not.

03About me

I grew up on James Clavell, Arthur Hailey and about twenty Slovak police procedurals — big books built out of research, and small ones built out of procedure. KHAMAR-DABAN is what happened when that reader went looking for a novel about a real disaster, thirty-three years after it happened, and decided to write the one I wanted to read.

I am interested in what happens afterwards. Half of the novel is the day on the ridge; the other half is the paperwork that came after it — flight hours against a fuel figure, an act drawn up at the site, a line in a file that says eleven minutes and did not come from anybody who was on that slope.

I wrote the book in Slovak. The English edition was made with the help of AI translation: a human translator was beyond the budget of a first book, and I would rather say that than not.

04For reviewers, booksellers and media

Review copies are available in EPUB and PDF, free and without conditions, to reviewers, bloggers, podcasters and booksellers. The paperback is available on Amazon.

Contact

miro@mironesbooks.com

I answer every message myself, usually within a day or two.

I write about the book, the research and the translation on Substack: mirones.substack.com