The Midnight Woman

Nadia Alexeeva was born in 1988 in the Moscow region. She studied drama and prose at the CWS writing school, and her works appeared in "Youth," "Friendship of Peoples," and "New World." She became a short-lister for "Lyubimovka" and a... finalist for the "Lyceum" award. "The Midnight Woman" is her debut novel. In spring 2016, Pavel from Moscow goes to Valaam to search for relatives, restoring a forty-year-old story. In the seventies, there was a boarding school in the monastery on the island, where World War II veterans and their families spent their last years. There, Semen finishes school and dreams of becoming a doctor. His motorboat speeds across Ladozhskoye Lake, splitting it with two white whiskers, as seals bask on the shoals, and from the shore the smell of bonfires wafts, alongside the surviving bell from the war that tolls. Very soon, this world will collapse due to the shot of a Finnish rifle... "The salvation of the human soul depends on the person, although it relies on a miracle. Nadia Alexeeva has created a serious, authentic text, free of modern irony about everything, — about the connection between us and the past, which not only does not break but is blending ever more closely with the present. This is a story about Orthodoxy as work, sometimes physical, dirty, and unsentimental; how else can it be if human souls are far from sterile and sometimes abandoned like the post-war inhabitants of Valaam?" Alexey Salynikov "The novel is akin to archaeological excavations, where the brush of a modern scholar carefully, layer by layer, removes the earth from what is hidden in the depths. The square of the excavation is an entire island, where time flows not in the linear way we are used to, but swirling and bringing together the most diverse fates." Asya Volodina