Footnote Press nabs ‘ferociously compelling’ new novel from Ukrainian-born Moskovich

Footnote has nabbed Nadezhda in the Dark, Yelena Moskovich’s “haunting, tender and ferociously compelling” new novel. Consulting editor Candida Lacey acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Jane Finigan at Lutyens & Rubinstein.

To be published in September, Nadezhda in the Dark is described by the publisher as “a vibrant, muscular genre-bending novel”. It is set across a single night in Berlin as decades of Russian and Ukrainian history unfold alongside a love affair.

The publisher synopsis said: “Two women sit side-by-side on the edge of a bed as night falls. Both emigrated from the Soviet Union at the age of seven [...] Neither speak. The silence between them is filled with hidden messages from Russian pop music, the raids of Moscow clubs, and the suicide of their friend Pasha.

"Decades resurface from the Stalin era and the solace of the Soviet poets of the Silver Age. Their small bedroom houses generations of Soviet diasporas, from the displaced indigenous people of Siberia to the Jewish refugees of the 1990s and the queer Ukrainians fleeing war today.”

Lacey said: “Yelena Moskovich is one of the most exciting and stylistically original writers at work today. That she is able to combine so many emotions and cultures and regimes into prose of such luminosity is extraordinary.”

Moskovich  is the author of three  novels, Virtuoso, The Natashas (both Serpent’s Tail) and A Door Behind A Door (Two Dollar Radio) which was long-listed  for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She emigrated to the US with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991, then again on her own to  Paris in 2007.