Spawn of Paradise

11 hrs. 41 min.

Language Russian

Author Marina Yudenich

Narrator Lina Muzyr

Description

A series of terrible murders—merciless, cunning, carefully planned, requiring considerable skill—shakes the narrow world of an elite society that long ago fenced itself off from life with an impassable fence. In these people’s lives there was everything that gave full reason to compare it with paradise. But that paradise was by no means granted to them by someone. They built it themselves—brick by brick, piling up the wall, and planting thin stalks of future groves in the paradise soil. And when they decided their own personal paradise had finally been erected on this sinful earth, it turned out that a terrible creature had moved in there—a clever, slippery, bloodthirsty one. No outsiders were allowed in here, and so only one thing remained: the predator was born and raised here; it was nothing other than the offspring of their man-made paradise.

Marina Yudenich is one of the most popular writers in Russia today, whose first novels sold in unheard-of print runs. And in her new novel she remains true to herself: the feeling of the constant presence of unspoken witnesses and envoys from eternity doesn’t let the reader go until the very last page, when the terrible secret of the monster is finally revealed. And then a thought comes quietly: do paradise and hell, the fall into sin and the feat—don’t they coexist in our souls, in an eternal struggle, but also in an eternal unity? And if you think it through, the dreadful monster that escaped its cage eats only the chosen.