Kruuga

Anna Luzhbina — a prose writer, finalist of the "Lyceum" award (2023), author of the collection "Quick People". She has been published in the magazines "Friendship of Peoples", "Banner", "New World", "Floors". "Kruuga" is her first novel. Yarik lives with his mother in a Karelian village. Here, mourners lament at weddings, storytellers weave tales, and souls travel in birds. Everything changes when the Krasnov family arrives in the village, and Yarik finds himself at the epicenter of the struggle between the old and the new, the living and the dead, the good and the evil. He is led by three women — the past, the present, the future, and only dance can unite everything. "What is 'Kruuga'? A dance of the random, a dance of the lost, fleeing from solitude, and ending up in it. To step out of the circle, or?.. 'Kruuga' continues. We will seek, we will wait, we will hope. We will dance". (Sasha Nikolaenko)