MASHA (35) lives in a village and is sure that everyone lives this way. She raises her teenage son alone, works as a primary school teacher, and does night shifts on the side—carrying a heavy bag for a mail carrier, moving sacks at a flour mill, and, as she thinks, being very—she is happy. The only drawback is a phobia: Masha is afraid of men, because she was left behind (a woman left by her husband). But her older sister VALENTINA (55)—the village “business mare,” as she puts it—is the owner of a women’s clothing store, the only one in the village. Valentina sharply changes Masha’s life. Without leaving Mikhailovka, Valentina buys an apartment in St. Petersburg on a mortgage by proxy—secretly from her husband, “the scarecrow,” as she calls him, of course sending a surprise as a kind of landing team in the form of her younger sister and her fourteen-year-old son to the big city of St. Petersburg.
What awaits Masha in an unfamiliar city? Scary even to think. In the village she has never seen homeless people. But St. Petersburg more than makes up for that. You’ll find out first how to survive by reading Marina Ivanova’s new thrilling novel.