Mother Doll

Prize-winning author Katya Apekina’s Mother Doll is a sharp, kaleidoscopic novel about the shadow of trauma in Russian history that follows four generations of mothers and daughters

Punctuated with Apekina’s ＂wry observations and wicked sense of humor＂ (Los Angeles Times), Mother Doll is a family epic and meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.

Apekina’s second novel ＂is not only a harrowing examination of generational trauma, but a damn funny one＂ (Vogue, Best Books of 2024).

Zhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast.

She’s deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia’s great-grandmother Irina, a Russian revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia.

As Irina begins her confession with the help of a purgatorial chorus of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn’t been willing to confront. But does either woman have what the other needs to understand their predicament?

Or will Irina be stuck in limbo, with Zhenia plagued by ancestral trauma, and her children after her?

Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. Her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a Third Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. She has done residences at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing, and Foundation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she moved to the US when she was three years old and currently lives in Los Angeles. Mother Doll is her second novel.