A beautiful novel about three extraordinary women and a family secret
Masha, a teacher in her mid-thirties, is stuck in an unhappy relationship with Mira. One day a call from Bykovo, the place of her childhood, tears her away from her everyday life. She has been asked to clear out and sell her late grandmother's house. When she arrives, she discovers that the mysterious Pyotr is still living there. The encounter with him sets off a carousel of memories: what secrets was her grandmother, aerospace engineer in Soviet service, hiding? Masha also remembers her mother, a wild child who became a mother herself at just seventeen. She begins to wonder about Pyotr's connection with her family. Did her mother seduce him out of jealousy towards the grandmother?
Katerina Poladjan's debut novel is a dense weave of reality, dream sequences and fragments of the past - a surreal dive into the depths of a childhood.
"In breathless staccato, in the suggestive present tense, the protagonist recounts her ghostly, oppressive journey into the Russian night and her own origins." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
