★Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is Russia's greatest grotesque and surrealist writer, world Fantasy Award winner, whose works have been published in more than 30 countries!
★Petrushevskaya was awarded the Big Book Award(one of Russia's largest literary Award) - Lifetime Achievement, in recognition of her lifetime achievements and contributions to literary creation in 2018!
★This book is one of the few novels by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya! A family ethics and crime novel with a hilarious social irony.
★Rights sold Norway!The United States, The United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Denmark, France and other multinational copyright are in hot negotiations!
★Over 20,000 copies have been sold in Russia!
★Complete English translation available.

　　Set in the 1980s through 1990s, the novel focuses on the life of Alina, 21y.o., a promising language student who has to drop her academic career because of an unplanned pregnancy. Alina decides to give up a baby for adoption after birth and is set to leave the hospital alone. In the hospital she meets another girl, Masha, a graduate from the Moscow Institute of Foreign Affairs, who is happily looking forward to the childbirth and speaks up of her life plans with the husband, Sergei, (he, too, is a future diplomat) in a republic in South Asia. Their family has been chosen for work in the Soviet trade mission there – a fantastic career for young specialists. Masha dies in childbirth, and Alina who delivers her baby at the same time, on an impulse exchanges bracelets with newborns’ names between the babies – she wishes a brighter future for her own son, and believes that the widowed father will still take the baby along abroad, away from the dull Soviet reality. By then Alina feels connected with her baby and feels sorry for Masha’s newborn son, and she agrees to breastfeed both babies while in the hospital. Soon Alina is told that her boy died from apetron infection, but she is the only one who knows that her son is alive, since she exchanged the names bracelets. What she does not know, however, is that the baby did not die as reported – the management in the hospital have long worked out a scheme to ease the trade of babies le for adoption – and that the buyer chose her boy (listed as Masha’s son) and the management unscrupulously exchanged the bracelets with names again.

　　Sergei is devastated, Masha’s death puts his career plans on threat – only married couples enlist for a foreign service. He approaches Alina with an off er to take over his dead wife’s identity and to travel together with his baby. Alina, who is certain that Sergei’s son is her own biological baby, agrees. She cannot even imagine what the future has in stock for her –there will be sexual and physical abuse from the spiteful factitious husband; survival against all odds in unthinkable circumstances in the strange country; a miraculous reunion with her own son in Moscow; struggling　for living with two kids and without income or work in the turbulent 1990s. What Alina is certain about when she accepts Sergei’s unscrupulous offer is that she will learn to be a good other.

　　Petrushevskaya’s impeccable style reaches its heights in the writer’s chef-d’oeuvre. e author’s exceptional command in rendering direct speech of her characters fi lls archetypical heroes with life and volume, while the high-pitch tension involves readers to otherwise stereotypical, if not trite, conflicts. The flamboyant cast of characters – girls who blackmail their future husbands with pregnancy; a father-in-law who banishes newlyweds in case they might claim rights for a flat in Moscow; a husband who is ready to exchange his dead wife for a stranger for the career’s sake; staff of maternity hospital who trade children left for adoption, documenting them as dead; a whimsical elderly lady who falls in love with an old handicapped genius artist; Alina’s former college mates with their lovers; Sergei’s driver building his private paradise in an off shore country and his wife, nicknamed Kustodiev, with a certainly distinguished fi gure – they all form a grand choir singing a hymn to the motherhood, a driving force of Petrushevskaya’s universe, where everyone is a criminal and a victim, and the author feels compassion for each.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

　　Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938. Petrushevskaya studied journalism at Moscow State University, and began writing prose in the mid ‘60s. Her fi rst work was published in 1972, only to be followed by almost ten years of offi cially enforced silence, when the publication of her plays and prose was forbidden. At that time Petrushevskaya earned her living by working as a radio and television journalist and contributing to newspapers and literary Magazines. When her somber and disturbing absurdist plays were fi nally staged, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya became widely recognized as one of Russia’s fi nest dramatists.

　　A collection of short stories and monologues, Immortal Love, was published in 1988 and met with stunning success among readers and critics alike. In 1992 Petrushevskaya’s novel The Time is Night was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize; it was translated into more than 30 languages and included in college courses as one of the most important novels of the 20th century. Since then, Petrushevskaya has published over 30 books of prose. Today, award-winning plays by Petrushevskaya are produced around the world, while her prose pieces have been published in more than 30 countries. Ludmila Petrushevskaya is considered to be the only indisputably canonical writer currently at work in Russia today.

　　In 1991, Petrushevskaya was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Germany. She has also received prizes from the leading literary journals in Russia. Petrushevskaya’s novels The Time is Night and Number One… were short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. In 2002, Petrushevskaya received Russia’s most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement. Petrushevskaya’s play BIFEM was awarded the first prize at the New Drama Festival in 2003. In 2003 Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was awarded the State Prize of Russian Federation. e World Fantasy Award was received in 2010 for the short stories collection published by Penguin in USA.