Virtuoso

For the first ten years of her life, Jana was a simple Czech girl, a watercolour. Her days were a clock run by the Czechoslovakian State Security, snapping hidden photos in their plainclothes. Much fervent artwork was created: Man Subverting Republic (Black and White), Woman Distributing (Tryptic). Man and Woman Organizing (Reprint).

Jana was a watercolour, until the raven-haired girl Zorka came. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris, hasn't seen Zorka in a decade.

Aimee is in Paris too, happily married and trying to get into her hotel room. On the other side of the door is her wife Dominique, face down on the hotel linen, one hand drooping off the side of the bed, fingers curled in, wedding ring white gold like an eye frozen mid-wink.

A body now, no longer a person.

As Aimee and Jana's stories slowly circle through time and place, they lead inexorably together...

Written with the dramatic tension of a Euripides tragedy, the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film and the imagination of a unique talent, Yelena Moskovich's Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel of love, desire, identity and belonging.

'A bold feminist novel: it contains a world of love and friendship between women in which men and boys are both indistinct and irrelevant ... The Natashas was a fascinating debut, Virtuoso is even better ... It is the Blue Velvet to her Eraserhead: a fully realized vision of a strange world.' -- Katharine Coldiron TLS
'Like Moskovich's powerful debut The Natashas, this is a book about the last generation to be born in the Soviet era and how the fall of communism shaped their social, sexual and artistic engagement with the world ... Moskovich's mother tongue is Ukrainian, and while her English is faultless, there's a pleasing otherness about her syntax and word choice, a sense that there are different languages operating just beneath the surface of the text. It makes for a reading experience that is always strikingly original ... Virtuoso is a fine, fraught, strange novel ... it will be fascinating to see what she writes next.' -- Alex Preston Guardian
Praise for The Natashas:'A brave, original work ... written in a Cubist jumble of voices, languages, and textures, The Natashas reads as if one were spinning a radio dial of the world -- Lauren Elkin Financial Times
A surreal and distinctively written exploration of identity ... wonderfully original -- Kirsty Logan Guardian
A hallucinatory torrent of imagery and ideas that moves entirely according to its own rules -- Alastair Mabbott Herald
Closest in tone and plot to a David Lynch film ... as heady yet ephemeral as smoke -- Lucy Scholes Independent
[A] unique read The List

Yelena Moskovich was born in 1984 in Ukraine (former USSR) and emigrated to the US with her family in 1991. After graduating with a degree in playwriting from Emerson College, Boston, she moved to Paris to study at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre, and later for a Master's degree in Art, Philosophy and Aesthetics from Universite Paris 8. Her plays have been produced in the US, Vancouver, Paris, and Stockholm. She lives in Paris.

For the first ten years of her life, Jana was a simple Czech girl, a watercolour. Her days were a clock run by the Czechoslovakian State Security, snapping hidden photos in their plainclothes. Much fervent artwork was created: Man Subverting Republic (Black and White), Woman Distributing (Tryptic). Man and Woman Organizing (Reprint). Jana was a watercolour, until the raven-haired girl Zorka came. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris, hasn't seen Zorka in a decade. Aimee is in Paris too, happily married and trying to get into her hotel room. On the other side of the door is her wife Dominique, face down on the hotel linen, one hand drooping off the side of the bed, fingers curled in, wedding ring white gold like an eye frozen mid-wink. A body now, no longer a person. As Aimee and Jana's stories slowly circle through time and place, they lead inexorably together... Written with the dramatic tension of a Euripides tragedy, the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film and the imagination of a unique talent, Yelena Moskovich's Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel of love, desire, identity and belonging.

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