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Four thematically linked novellas that focus on obsessive relationships, stolen identities, and illusions of grandeur in the post-1989 Carpathian-Balkan region: An American expat in Europe appropriates the identity of a Romanian orphan in her desperate search for love. A dictator's daughter learns, while on a study trip to France, that her parents have been overthrown and are about to be executed. A minor character from a novel confronts her own insignificance. A wife announces to her husband of forty years that she's just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
About the author
Maria Rybakova has been a writer since she was twenty-four. She won several prizes for her Russian novels, including ¿Globus¿, ¿Eurekä, ¿Anthologiä, ¿The Students¿ Booker¿, ¿Russian Prize¿, and was nominated for the international Jan Michalski literary award. Maria Rybakoväs novels have been translated into German, Spanish, and French.
¿Anna Grom and Her Phantom¿ (1999) is an epistolary love story, while ¿A Sharp Knife for a Tender Heart¿ (2009) is a tale of a shape-shifting river spirit and its son, both causing unintended destruction in the world surrounding them. The novels ¿A Draught of a Human Being¿ (2014) and ¿If There is Paradise¿ (2020) deal with the Soviet past and the questions of guilt and responsibility. Her verse novel ¿Gnedich¿, dedicated to the first Russian translator of the ¿Iliad¿, appeared in an English translation in 2015. She teaches literature at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.
Report
"[Maria Rybakova] has a superb ear for seamlessly layering different registers [...] Her winningly touching novel deserves an afterlife of its own in an English translation."-Andrew Kahn in the Times Literary Supplement "Written in free verse, Rybakova balances evocative indulgence with enough dramatic tension in a surprisingly compelling narrative."-Michael A. Orthofer in the Complete Review
