Sonechka and Other Stories — Ludmila Ulitskaya

Sonechka is a psychological melodrama about a plain, bookish woman who marries an ex-convict at the age of thirty, has a daughter, then loses both her husband and daughter and returns to solitude among her books. Already translated into several European languages, it was shortlisted for the Booker Russian Novel Prize and received the prestigious Medici Prize for foreign fiction in France and the Penne Prize in Italy. A French critic remarked, “There has never been a heroine in literature who was less heroic and yet psychologically striking.”