Das Pferd im Brunnen

It all begins in a small flat with a rocking chair in a Russian spa town near Kazan, where Stalin once spent his summers. This is where Valya returns after the death of her grandmother Nina. Valya goes in search of traces, tries to understand where she herself comes from. She remembers the women she grew up with, fundamentally different, but united in their abhorrence of any dependence: there is her great-grandmother Tanya, who had Valya baptised as a child in a dangerous night-and-fog operation. And of course Nina with the determined gait and the coquettish cherry mouth, who notoriously lied and made everyone around her grow a head shorter. But she also had quite different sides. And it is only much later that Valya learns of Nina's harsh fate, of which she never spoke ... Valya, who lives between worlds, between a northern German village on the B77 and her childhood home in Kazan, realises more and more how deeply these lives have shaped her.Valery Cheplanova is a powerful new voice. In her autobiographically inspired novel, she finds her very own luminous, pictorial narrative style; intense snapshots come together to form a great story about four strong women in 20th and 21st century Russia.