Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

One of Russia's best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next. - The New York Times At first glance, the stories in The New Adventures of Helen seem simple, even child-like, but a deep reading reveals satire and darkness manifested through classic fairy tale tropes characteristically upended by Petrushevskaya. These 'adult...

Dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist from the author of There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby. In these dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya tells of strange encounters in claustrophobic communal apartments, ill-fated holiday romances, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, tentative courtships, rampant infidelity, tender devotion and terrifying madness. By turns...

From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Russia's greatest living absurdist and surrealistic writer and New York Times bestseller: traditional family drama meets burlesque social satire, enveloped in a Bollywood soap-opera plot. Set in the 1980s and '90s, Kidnapped focuses on the life of Alina, a promising language student who must drop her academic career because of an unplanned pregnancy. Alina decides to give...