Yelena Moskovich

For the first ten years of her life, Jana was a simple Czech girl, her days run with grey precision by the Czechoslovakian State Security. Then the raven-haired girl Zorka appeared. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris for a Czech medical supply company, hasn't seen Zorka in a decade.Aimée is in Paris too, living under the shadow of a menacing blue cloud, mourning the death of her wife Dominique. Meanwhile, in the ether of a lesbian internet chatroom, a teenager from the American Midwest who goes by the moniker 0_hotgirlAmy_0 plans to rescue Dominxxika_N39, a rural Czech housewife, from her tyrannical husband, a hospital bed salesmen.As Aimée and Jana's stories slowly circle through the surreal fluctuations of the past and present, they lead inexorably together, to a mysterious bar on Paris's Rue de Prague...Written with the dramatic tension of Euripidean tragedy and the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film, Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel of grief, revolt, identity and first loves and last loves.

Virtuoso

In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of '91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga's past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.

A Door Behind a Door

Béatrice, a solitary young jazz singer from a genteel Parisian suburb, meets a mysterious woman named Polina. Polina visits her at night and whispers in her ear: 'There are people who leave their bodies and their bodies go on living without them. These people are named Natasha.'César, a lonely Mexican actor working in a call centre, receives the opportunity of a lifetime: a role as a serial killer on a French TV series. But as he prepares for the audition, he starts falling in love with the psychopath he is to play. Béatrice and César are drawn deeper into a city populated with visions and warnings, taunted by the chorusing of a group of young women, trapped in a windowless room, who all share the same name ... Natasha.A startlingly original novel that recalls the unsettling visual worlds of Cindy Sherman and David Lynch and the writing of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami, The Natashas establishes Yelena Moskovich as one of the most exciting young writers of her generation.

The Natashas

Olga receives a phone call from a man she thought she d never hear from again. Her life has changed since their childhood in the Soviet Union. She has settled down with a girl she loves and has moved on from her previous life. Answering the call opens a Pandora's box of memories and unsolved puzzles: an unexplained murder, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. In the search for answers, Olga uncovers an underground midwestern Russian mafia, and a string of connected stabbings, all of which seem irrevocably linked to her past.

'Moskovich is the master of silky, slinky sentences that run in unexpected directions' The Telegraph 'Sexy and readable . . . a celebration of resilience and of myriad survivors' Times Literary Supplement 'One of the best fiction releases of 2023' Dazed Digital A queer anthem for doomed youth by the author of Virtuoso and A Door Behind a Door On the longest night of a Berlin winter two women sit side-by-side. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, one from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia. A thigh shifts, fingers fold in, a shoulder is lowered. Neither speak. As silence weighs heavy between them, decades of Ukrainian and Russian history resurface, from Yiddish jokes, Kyiv's DIY queer parties and the hidden messages in Russian pop music, to resistance in Odessa, raids in Moscow clubs and the death of their friend. As the requiem inside the narrator's head expands within the darkness of the room, she asks the all-important question: what does it mean to have hope? 'Nadezhda in the Dark is a marvel - a spellbinding work' LAUREN ELKIN 'Yelena Moskovich is a true original, a literary titan, an innovator' JENNI FAGAN

Yelena Moskovich

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