With her novel Bogdanova makes a diagnosis of the whole generation with clarity, bitterness and compassion, like no other modern Russian writer.
——meduza.io

This is like Nabokov’s Ada — the pain and gloom of the 90ies and the early aughts: a granny’s country house, a family saga, strange backyards, the family blood. Today this all is neither wildly exotic nor noirish — we have survived, have grown up and so we can speak about what it is like to be a strange girl in a strange time. Vera Bogdanova unwinds traumas and fates of her characters carefully and gently, like blood-soaked bandage. Bogdanova is not trying to make her characters suffer to amuse some hypothetical reader.
On the contrary, she seeks ways to save them all. She succeeds, eventually, even with those who cannot be saved.
—— Tatsiana Zamirovskaya the author of The Deadnet

The first thing you want to do when you finish the novel is name it the book of the generation. The 90s, the aughts, economic downfall and consumerism, Soviet and post-Soviet patriarchal norms, domestic violence, terroristic attacks on the news, upsurging nationalistic movements at the backdrop, a suppressed sexuality and liberation from inhibitions and social restrains — all these contexts intertwine in a smartly contrived plot.
——Rules of Life (former Esquire)

In The Season of Poisoned Fruits the violence is a norm, while happiness is doomed. There’re no positive characters in the novel, yet quite a lot of typical ones, easy to recognize: these are words we heard from the family, these are traumas we wished to share…
A common love story turns into a smartly contrived, complex psychological drama about feelings and historical memory.
——Afisha Daily

With her novel, Vera Bogdanova gives a chance to speak up and fight back to those women who have long been used to keep quiet and endure.
——Yunost magazine

★Nominated for the Big Book Award 2022!
★Nominated for the New Literature Award 2022!
★Nominated for Yasnaya Polyana Prize 2022!
★With this melancholic and sad love story Vera Bogdanova throws limelight
to the hidden psychological traumas torturing people in their forties in
modern Russia, and smartly investigates the social (and political)
turmoil that forms the core of the generation, growing up in the 1990s.
★The message is bitter: we are poisoned fruits, the fruits of delusions, obsessions and uncertainty of our time.

Since early childhood, Zhenya was told that she should be a good girl: get higher education, build a career, get married and have children, all this before she’s thirty. And yet there she is — hitting thirty, no longer able to have children or known to set healthy boundaries, secretly struggling with alcohol addiction, hiding away literally at the end of the world, and still pining for the only person she ever loved, a man she has known since childhood — her cousin Ilya. They have been irresistibly drawn to each other since sixteen, and Zhenya sees this forbidden and devastating love affair as her only comfort, and her curse. Not only has it brought doom on her own head, but on anyone she’s ever known, or so she feels.

Ilya, in the meantime, is just as desperate to be “a real man”: to earn more, provide for his family, never have to beg, show weakness, or witness the abuse his mother suffered from the violent thug of a stepfather. Ilya, too, hides a dark secret, bearing the guilt for his stepfather’s apparently accidental death. But none of his efforts to conform to the “social norm” pays off or brings relief — his life is stuck in a rut and he himself in an unhappy marriage, unable to break the vicious worksleep-mortgage circle.

His half-sister Dasha, on the other hand, unable to embrace her own sexuality (and her unrequited teenage attraction to Zhenya), still sees her abusive father as a role model, and time after time falls for the same wife-basher type. One of them becomes her husband, and this union threatens Dasha’s life.

Each of them faces their own demons, failing to see how their choices end up ruining the lives of others — and their own.

Set against the dramatic backdrop of early to mid 2000s, with its terrorist attacks, Beslan school siege, London bombings and general chaos, their stories echo with the historical turmoil in a desperate search of a new identity.

The Season of Poisoned Fruits is the story of a generation that grew up in the 90s, children of parents who survived in the chaos having plunged the country. Today these children have grown up and they seek security and stability they were deprived of, also desperately searching for their own selves. Yet would they find a “new beautiful world” or the poison from the fruits of the past won’t let them see the way?

Vera Bogdanova (1986) was born in Moscow. She graduated from Moscow Region State University as a professional translator from the English language and attended language school in New York. In 2019 she completed a two-year creative writing course run by Olga Slavnikova. Bogdanova’s short stories were published in anthologies, literary journals and platforms. She is also the author of sci-fi novels published under the literary pen-name Vera Ogneva, which received nominations for literary awards (New Horizons and Interpresscon in 2017). Her first novel, published under her real name, Pavel Zhang and Other River Beasts, was a finalist of the Litsei Literature Award for Young Writers, entered a short list for the National Bestseller Prize, and was in the run for the Big Book Award, Yasnaya Polyana Award and New Literature Prize (NOS). Bogdanova runs a blog on translated fiction from the States and the United Kingdom, @wordsnletters. Her
novel The Season of Poisoned Fruits received a warm welcome from critics and struck a chord with readers, coming out in the second printing within two months since publication.