2023
First Published
3.60
Average Rating
268
Number of Pages
From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Russia’s greatest living absurdist and surrealistic writer and New York Times traditional family drama meet 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 a baby for adoption after birth and is set to leave the hospital alone. In the hospital she meets another girl, Masha, who is happily looking forward to the childbirth and speaks up of her life plans with the husband in a republic in South Asia. When Masha dies in childbirth, Alina impulsively exchanges the babies' name bracelets in an attempt to send her newborn son away from the dull reality of Soviet life. But then the unthinkable Masha's husband asks Alina to falsify her identity and come with him in the foreign service. Full of twists and turns, Kidnapped results in a drama worthy of a daytime soap medical deceit, identity scams, and falsified death abound. Despite it all, Alina survives against all odds in unthinkable circumstances, sure above all that she will learn to be a good mother.
Avg Rating
3.60
Number of Ratings
47
5 STARS
13%
4 STARS
47%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads
Author
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
Author · 15 books
Ludmilla Stefanovna Petrushevskaya (Russian: Людмила Стефановна Петрушевская, Людмила Петрушевская) (born 26 May 1938) is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright. Her works include the novels The Time Night (1992) and The Number One, both short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, and Immortal Love, a collection of short stories and monologues. Since the late 1980s her plays, stories and novels have been published in more than 30 languages. In 2003 she was awarded the Pushkin Prize in Russian literature by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Germany. She was awarded the Russian State Prize for arts (2004), the Stanislavsky Award (2005), and the Triumph Prize (2006).
