Author(s): Yelena Moskovich

Lesbian & Bi Fiction

'Yelena Moskovich is a true original, a literary titan, an innovator' JENNI FAGAN

A queer anthem for doomed youth by the author of Virtuoso and A Door Behind a Door

On the longest night of a Berlin winter two women sit side-by-side. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, one from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia.

A thigh shifts, fingers fold in, a shoulder is lowered. Neither speak.

As silence weighs heavy between them, decades of Ukrainian and Russian history resurface, from Yiddish jokes, Kyiv's DIY queer parties and the hidden messages in Russian pop music, to resistance in Odessa, raids in Moscow clubs and the death of their friend.

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?

Review: 'Yelena Moskovich is a true original, a literary titan, an innovator, her prose is both poetry and punk, political without any obviousness to it, pure, demented in the best possible way, and always brilliant. She is one of my favourite living writers' - Jenni Fagan

'Cosmic and intimate, reading Nadezhda in the Dark is like tumbling through jewelled galaxies of words. There is tender grief and love in the negative space between its dazzling stars; and rays of turbulent history refracted through a turbulent mind and body. Easily one of the greatest writers to ever dance on our scorched, collapsing plane of reality' - Tom Benn

'Yelena Moskovich writes the page on fire. Meandering, marauding, tender, lacerating, and entirely alive. All of life is here, and Yelena Moskovich does it like no other' - Rosa Rankin-Gee

'Nadezhda in the Dark is a stunning read. It is beautiful and important and made me laugh and cry. If you read one book this year, it must be this one' - Camilla Grudova

'A dazzling moonlit and deeply shadowed book, Nadezhda in the Dark draws out personal landscapes in the hopeless, war-wreckage of the now, the self against and within the unreachable and contradictory past. In its lovers, sitting in stillness together, it threads twin veins of queer love and queer angst. A novel that sings low and sinks teeth - is there anyone out there who is doing it like Yelena Moskovich right now?' - Helen McClory

January 2024