Nadezhda in the Dark

A queer anthem for doomed youth by the author of Virtuoso and The Natashas.Two women sit side-by-side on the edge of a bed as night falls. Both emigrated from the Soviet Union as children, the unnamed narrator from Soviet Kharkov, and her girlfriend, Nadezhda, from Soviet Moscow to Berlin. A thigh shifts, fingers fold in, a shoulder is lowered. It is the longest night of the year.Neither speak.The silence between them is filled with hidden messages from Russian pop music, the raids of Moscow clubs, and the suicide of their friend Pasha. Decades resurface from the Stalin era and the solace of the Soviet poets of the Silver Age. 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?

Moskovich writes sentences that lilt and slink, her plots developing as a slow seduction and then clouding like a smoke-filled room, Moskovich's prose radiates with heat, We don't often see writing like this: genuinely subversive and innovative., Brave, original... Moskovich's prose radiates with heat as she describes the life animating the city from within, a breath that unites us in our humanity, even the most marginalised. She locates that delicate point of equilibrium between aesthetics and outrage., Closest in tone and plot to a David Lynch film... confounding and beguiling in equal measure; prose that reads as heady yet ephemeral as smoke.

YELENA MOSKOVICH is the author of three novels, Virtuoso, The Natashas (both Serpent's Tail) and A Door Behind A Door (Influx Press) which was long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She emigrated to the US with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991, then again on her own to Paris in 2007.