Season of Poisoned Fruit

Cutting-edge prose that reveals the underside of an outwardly prosperous life: abuse and gaslighting, codependency and suppression of will, alcoholism and loneliness.

“The Season of Poisoned Fruits” is Vera Bogdanova’s new novel by a writer, translator, and literary reviewer, author of the book “Pavel Zhang and Other River Creatures” (shortlist of the National Bestseller prize).

From early on, Zhenya was told that she must be good: study to become a translator, get married, have children. Now she’s almost thirty, with no husband and no children—only alcohol problems and an irresistible pull toward her cousin.

Dasha, like her mother, doesn’t know how to choose men. She seeks men like her father—drinking kitchen boors—and marries one of them.

Ilya is afraid of not being a real man. You have to earn more, love the family more—yet the meaning disappears and life turns into a Groundhog Day.

“The Season of Poisoned Fruits” is about a generation of modern thirty-somethings raised in the chaos of the 1990s and the terror attacks of the early 2000s. The novel’s characters are afraid to live their own lives—and can happiness be found when the world around them is exploding and burning?

“It’s like ‘Hell’ (the ‘Inferno’) by Nabokov dropped into a hospital and the chthonic reality of the 1990s and early 2000s—Grandma’s dacha, a family saga, other people’s courtyards, native blood; now all of this isn’t exotic and not just ‘darkness’—we survived, grew up, and we’re talking about what it’s like to be a strange girl in a strange time. Carefully and gently unspooling, like bloodied bandages, the wounds and fates of the characters, Bogdanova doesn’t make them suffer for the entertainment of some hypothetical reader—on the contrary, she looks for ways to save everyone. And she finds them—even for those who can’t be saved.” Tatyana Zamirovskaya