A stunning, novel-in-verse exploration of LGBTQ+ life in the shadow of the former Soviet blocOn the longest night of a milk-dark Berlin winter, a doomed...
A stunning, novel-in-verse exploration of LGBTQ+ life in the shadow of the former Soviet blocOn the longest night of a milk-dark Berlin winter, a doomed couple sit side by side on their bed. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, the narrator from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia. The lights are off. Neither speak. In their silence, a century of Ukrainian and Russian history resurfaces: forgotten literary characters, Yiddish maxims, contraband jokes, LGBT life in the post-Soviet bloc, Jewish diaspora to Israel, beauty vlogs, shaken sanity, hidden messages in Russian pop music, resistance in Odessa, Moscow club raids, and the death of a beloved friend. The requiem inside the narrator's head circles the question pinned within the darkness: What does it mean to hold onto Nadezhda, whose name means "hope"? And is holding it enough?
Yelena Moskovich is a Ukrainian-born American and French author of four novels. She emigrated from the Soviet Union with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991, then solo to Paris in 2007, and recently back to America. Her writing has been long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, awarded the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize and named in the Guardian, Telegraph, and Irish Times Books of the Year. She's written for the Paris Review, Vogue, Times Literary Supplement, and worked for the European Jewish Congress and Yahad-In Unum, as well as taught graduate creative writing at University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture. She lives in Independence, Missouri.
