Mother Doll by Katya Apekina
*** BALCONES PRIZE FINALIST ***Prize-winning author Katya Apekina's Mother Doll is a sharp, kaleidoscopic novel about the shadow of trauma in Russian history that follows four generations of mothers and daughters
Punctuated with Apekina's "wry observations and wicked sense of humor" (Los Angeles Times), Mother Doll is a family epic and meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.
Apekina's second novel "is not only a harrowing examination of generational trauma, but a damn funny one" (Vogue, Best Books of 2024).
Zhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn't want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast.
She's deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia's great-grandmother Irina, a Russian revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia.
As Irina begins her confession with the help of a purgatorial chorus of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn't been willing to confront. But does either woman have what the other needs to understand their predicament?
Or will Irina be stuck in limbo, with Zhenia plagued by ancestral trauma, and her children after her?
Katya Apekina is the author of the novel The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish. She has had stories published in The Iowa Review, Santa Monica Review, West Branch, Joyland, PANK and elsewhere, and has appeared on the Notable List of Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. She translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), which was short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film New Orleans, Mon Amour, starring Elisabeth Moss, which premiered at SXSW in 2008. Born in Moscow, she currently lives in Los Angeles.
Find out more here: apekina.com
Twitter: @katyaapekina
Instagram: @katyaapekina
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781419770951 |
| ISBN 10 | 1419770950 |
| Title | Mother Doll |
| Author | Katya Apekina |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Harry N. Abrams |
| Year published | 2024-03-12 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |