Nadezhda in the Dark

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

Sexy and readable [...] This is a story of one night, but you could equally describe it as a 182-page love letter; a celebration of resilience and of myriad survivors; a troubling history of LGBTQ+ communities in Eastern Europe; and a lament for lost homelands, and all the other losses that ensue [...] If you love the Beats, you may find yourself loving Yelena Moskovich's night in Berlin even more ― Times Literary Supplement

Moskovich is the master of silky, slinky sentences that run in unexpected directions . . . Fact and fiction intermingle, as storytelling becomes a means of making it through the night, and a way of processing a tumultuous history ― The Telegraph

Yelena Moskovich's new novel Nadezhda in the Dark might just be one of the best fiction releases of 2023 ― Dazed Digital

Nadezhda in the Dark is a marvel - a spellbinding work of essayistic, poetic prose, urgent, never not surprising. Yelena Moskovich reminds us that the best novels are adventures of language and form, and acts of bearing witness to the fates of the tender body in the world -- Lauren Elkin

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 ― award-winning author of OXBLOOD

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 ― author of DREAMLAND

About the Author

YELENA MOSKOVICH is the author of four novels, Virtuoso, The Natashas (both Serpent's Tail) and A Door Behind A Door (Influx Press) which was long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and most recently Nadezhda in the Dark (Footnote Press). She emigrated to the US with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991, then again on her own to Paris in 2007.