He was only 24 years old when his first novel, "Captain of the Steppe", was published, receiving praise not only from critics but from the jury of the Russian Booker Prize, which shortlisted the novel for the 1995 award. Pavlov went on to win the Prize in 2002 with his next book, "The Matiushin Case" (English translation published in 2014 by And Other Stories). "The Matiushin Case" was the second novel in what would become the thematic trilogy set in the last days of the Soviet empire: "Tales from the Last Days." All three works in the trilogy are stand-alone novels.