From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, New York Times bestselling author and Russia’s greatest living absurdist, comes an elaborate family drama, social satire, and burlesque of twists, coincidences, and hijinks. Kidnapped is a madcap crime spree that caroms from crisis to crisis, through lands real and imagined. It tells the tale of Sergei Sertsov, not one but two boys from Moscow with more than just a name in common, and the women who go to great lengths to protect them. The story unfurls in a whirlwind of deceit and double crossing—babies are switched at birth, documents forged, palms greased, identities assumed, deaths faked, and authorities duped. Across decades and continents, the narrative veers from a trade office in tropical Handia, to Russia as it plunges through perestroika and into post-Soviet free fall, to a mansion in opulent Montegasco at the start of the twenty-first century. With a dizzying array of characters and settings, Kidnapped is a hilarious saga of determined women triumphing over their many oppressors to save the people they love.
"From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, New York Times bestseller and Russia's greatest living absurdist and surrealist writer: traditional family drama meets burlesque social satire, enveloped in a Bollywood soap-opera plot. Set in the 1980s and '90s, Kidnapped focuses on the life of Alina, a promising language student who must drop her academic career because of an unplanned pregnancy. Alina decides to give up her baby for adoption after birth and plans to leave the hospital alone. While she's there, she meets Masha, who is looking forward to childbirth and a future with her husband in a republic in South Asia. When Masha dies in childbirth, Alina impulsively switches the babies' name bracelets in an attempt to send her newborn son away from the dull reality of Soviet life. But then the unthinkable happens: Masha's husband asks Alina to falsify her identity and come with him in the foreign service. What ensues is a drama worthy of a soap opera, full of medical deceit, identity scams, and faked deaths. Through it all, Alina survives in unthinkable circumstances, sure above all that she will learn to be a good mother"--
"The best novel of the year, in every page there's more wit and talent than in the whole contemporary Russian prose, everyone forgive me. Written with much physiology, humor, the novel is at times scaring, always fascinating and precise from a playwright's perspective." -Dmitry Bykov, the nationally-rewarded author of The Living Souls and The Evacuator
"The scope is epic - the world of Petrushevskaya has no division between important and secondary events, main characters and the rest; each character is measured in scale of fate, the light from cosmos flowing equally though everyone The new moment in this apotheosis of the "matriparchy" is that the great mother, the main hero in Petrushevskaya's fiction, includes this time both mothers and grandmothers who save other's children not only from death but also from the orphan-hood." -colta.ru
"It seems, they (Petrushevskaya's characters) appear strange to us only. Petrushevskaya as the author completely believes in the story that we read as a funny soap-opera-type nonesense. What is more - the author is ready to feel sorry for everyone involved in this roll of human passions. This very inexorable love and tenderness towards her characters has always brought up a suspicion about some author's secret knowledge." -syg.ma
