Government warnings about radiation levels in her hometown (a stone’s throw from Chernobyl) be damned! Baba Dunja is going home. And she’s taking a motley bunch of her former neighbors with her. With strangely misshapen forest fruits to spare and the town largely to themselves, they have pretty much everything they need and they plan to start anew.

The terminally ill Petrov passes the time reading love poems in his hammock; Marja takes up with the almost 100-year-old Sidorow; Baba Dunja whiles away her days writing letters to her daughter. Life is beautiful. That is until one day a stranger turns up in the village and once again the little idyllic settlement faces annihilation.

From the prodigiously talented Alina Bronsky, this is a return to the iron-willed and infuriatingly misguided older female protagonist that she made famous with her unforgettable Russian matriarch, Rosa Achmetowna, in The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine. Here she tells the story of a post-meltdown settlement, and of an unusual woman, Baba Dunja, who, late in life, finds her version of paradise.

Alina Bronsky
The Daily Beast calls Alina Bronsky "an exciting new voice in the literary world." Bronsky is the author of Broken Glass Park and The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

• Jan 1 2017
  Editor’s Pick: “Bronsky has written an enthralling story of humor, tragedy, and triumph . . . ”
  — World Literature Today
• Sep 20 2016
  “ . . . a short book that will leave a deep mark on your heart.”
  — The Boston Bibliophile
• Aug 26 2016
  “This is a novella worth looking out for and a good introduction to Bronsky’s work if you’re yet to discover this brilliant writer.”
  — The Writes of Woman
• Jun 11 2016
  “ . . . a delightful book.”
  — TripFiction
• May 19 2016
  “Bronsky does a lot very nicely here...”
  — The Complete Review
• Apr 13 2016
  "[...] a glimpse of life in the radioactive abyss."
  — Kirkus Reviews