Russia Girl

A sex trafficking victim wreaks vengeance on the criminal gang who enslaved her. Born into poverty in the heart of Eastern Europe, Natalia Nicolaeva dreams of a better life. When she is offered a job abroad, however, the promise of the outside world is as terrifying as it is thrilling. After gathering the courage to leave her tiny village, it doesn’t take long before Natalia’s worst fears are confirmed. Kidnapped by a vicious gang of criminals, Natalia must fight first for her honor and then for her life. Russia Girl portrays Natalia’s transformation from innocent farm girl to lethal dispenser of vigilante justice. This is one girl they never should have messed with. Be warned, this story is gritty and raw, but guaranteed to keep your pulse pounding. Author Q&A with Kenneth Rosenberg Q: This novel is a bit of a different take on the typical thriller genre. What was the inspiration for this story? A: I saw a documentary about women from Eastern Europe who were lured abroad under false pretenses and sold into prostitution. The film told the stories of five women who had managed to escape captivity and survive to tell about it. My book was inspired by their stories of courage. Q: Does that mean some of your novel is actually true? A: The circumstances in the first half of the novel were based on actual events. I decided to take that story and turn it into a thriller, where the main character becomes a kick-ass vigilante, dispensing her own brand of justice. Q: This book is set in Istanbul and on a farm in the breakaway republic of Transnistria. Do you have any experience in these places? Have you been to them? A: When I was working on the book, I traveled to Istanbul for research. I spent a week walking the streets and exploring the neighborhoods where it is set. Transnistria is more of a challenge, with complicated visa requirements, but I did spend time just across the border in Ukraine, which I felt was similar enough to give me a sense for the region. Q: Who have you been most influenced by as a writer? A: I’ve always loved a good international thriller. I guess this goes back to my childhood, when my friends and I loved all of the James Bond movies and couldn’t wait for the newest one to come out. Later, I came to be a big fan of the Bourne series. My books are probably closest in DNA to the Millennium Series by Stieg Larsson, including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. They both involve a strong female character who goes through hell but comes out fighting. Q: Does this mean we can expect more from Natalia Nicolaeva? A: Absolutely! I’ve already finished the next two books. Vendetta Girl is set in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Spy Girl takes place in London. Mystery Girl is set in Budapest and is coming along nicely. I hope that Natalia has a long and illustrious career of fighting injustice all around the world.

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.

Award-winning writer Kingsley Amis's newest novel is a dazzling romp through a territory he has made triumphantly his own--the battle of the sexes and the conflicting claims of love and integrity. Art, literature, political correctness, and the gender war all come under Amis's seasoned scalpel in this corrosively funny academic satire.

Illuminates the role that private schools for Jewish girls played in Russian Jewish society and documents their influence on contemporary political discourse and educational innovation.

Elizaveta Fen's father was a provincial governor in Bielorussia. The family lived in the Russian equivalent of Edwardian comfort. Fen shares her story of her days in a boarding school and her aspirations to be a writer and to fall in love--properly in love, not into an adolescent infatuation. She concludes with the day she set forth to meet "real life" at a university in St. Petersburg, in 1917.

“Sex, booze, and Russian intrigue . . . A cool cocktail mixed with parts of Updike and De Vries, with a peel of le Carré.”—The New York Times Book Review Richard Vaisey is a respected scholar specializing in Russian studies when Anna Danilova arrives on campus. A visiting Russian poet with a mission more than literary, Anna challenges his integrity—and his marriage. Richard’s beautiful but unspeakably monstrous wife, Cordelia, seeks revenge on her adulterous husband, determined to ruin him by canceling his credit cards and reporting his car as stolen to the police. But Richard must face even further humiliating consequences, for the seductive Anna is also an irremediably bad poet. The Russian Girl is vintage Kingsley Amis: entertaining, thought-provoking, and wittily wise. “A brilliant satire . . . Kingsley Amis can skewer the modern world like no other writer.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Genuinely entertaining, and corrosively funny . . . Amis’s work is the result of beautifully organized and polished craftsmanship.”—The New York Review of Books

One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year National Book Award Finalist Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award National Best Seller "Splendidly imagined . . . Thrilling" --Simon Winchester "A genuine masterpiece" --Gary Shteyngart Spellbinding, moving--evoking a fascinating region on the other side of the world--this suspenseful and haunting story announces the debut of a profoundly gifted writer. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls--sisters, eight and eleven--go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty--densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska--and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused. In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer's virtuosic feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel brings us to a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.

Recently unearthed in the archives of Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, Nina Lugovskaya's diary offers rare insight into the life of a teenage girl in Stalin's Russia-when fear of arrest was a fact of daily life. Like Anne Frank, thirteen-year-old Nina is conscious of the extraordinary dangers around her and her family, yet she is preoccupied by ordinary teenage concerns: boys, parties, her appearance, who she wants to be when she grows up. As Nina records her most personal emotions and observations, herreflections shape a diary that is as much a portrait of her intense inner world as it is the Soviet outer one. Preserved here, these markings-the evidence used to convict Nina as a "counterrevolutionary"- offer today's reader a fascinating perspective on the era in which she lived.