Snegurochka

Snegurochka is a novel about a young English mother adrift and isolated in Kiev in 1992-3. It draws on the city’s iconography as well as theories of imaginative geography to create a layered and singular sense of place. Themes include alienation, motherhood and memory, and the ways in which seemingly domestic/private concerns are also deeply political. The protagonist is an isolated observer driven by the need to provide for her child which means she must engage with hyperinflation, the legacy of famine, the black market, the aftermath of Chernobyl and the looming presence of Russia. Other characters are used to reveal the instability of the single story: the journalist’s ‘scoop’; the nationalist myth; the folktale of Snegurochka; motherhood itself. The novel asks whether forms of truth lodged in deeply-held superstition are as powerful as those based in rational thought. Scenes frequently shift without scaffolding to discomfort and intrigue the reader.