Short Synopsis
Prize-winning author Katya Apekina's Mother Doll is a sharp and visceral nesting doll of a novel, about four generations of mothers and daughters and the inherited trauma cast by Russian history.

Full Synopsis
Zhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn't want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast. She's deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia's great-grandmother Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia.

As Irina begins her confession with the help of a purgatorial chorus of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn't been willing to confront. But does either woman have what the other needs to understand their predicament? Or will Irina be stuck in limbo, with Zhenia plagued by ancestral trauma, and her children after her?

Ferociously funny and deeply moving, Mother Doll forces us to look at how painful secrets stamp themselves from one generation to the next. Katya Apekina's second novel is a family epic and a meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.

"This is an intergenerational family novel that manages to be mesmerizing in every storyline." ---Chicago Review of Books

"Christina Delaine's Russian accent is without equal in this expansive family story. . . . Delaine is skilled at pace and inflection, and her shifts in dialogue are fine, so dedicated listeners will enjoy the result." ---AudioFile

"Moving fluidly between Zhenia's present and Irina's past, Mother Doll is a startingly sharp and affecting novel, exploring notions of motherhood, desire, and possession." ---Shelf Awareness Starred Review

"Like the Russian nesting dolls that inspired it, this novel reveals layer after layer of poignant delights." ---Kirkus Reviews Starred Review

"[A] provocative vision of a world in which past and present are not as neatly separated as they appear." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Balancing raucous hilarity with embedded pain, it may be the year's weirdest one-of-a-kind read." ---Library Journal