A new short story collection about women from the author of the autofiction novel *The Bay of Patience*. – A meticulous and sensitive exploration of how diverse female identity is shaped through familiar life trajectories—coming of age, the search for meaning and stability, the struggle against misogyny, separation, and motherhood.

The book is rooted in the Orthodox legend of ‘Zoya’s Standing’ in Kuibyshev; in the author’s own words, it is a philosophical novel about modern man’s rejection of the miraculous. In the provincial backwater of Grechansk, the impossible occurs. A young woman named Tatiana gathers her friends for a dance party; finding herself without a partner, she invites... Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker...

On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky invited a man he knew only as Jacques Mornard into his study. Mornard waited for Trotsky to sit, then smashed an ice pick he had hidden in his raincoat into Trotsky’s skull. For over a decade, Trotsky’s greatest enemy, Joseph Stalin, had been trying to arrange his murder. Stalin’s agents had hunted him across Europe and into a lonely, bitter exile in Mexico. He...