The Natashas

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

Beatrice, a solitary young jazz singer from a genteel Parisian suburb, meets a mysterious woman named Polina. Polina visits her at night and whispers in her ear:'There are people who leave their bodies and their bodies go on living without them. These people are named Natasha.'

Cesar, a lonely Mexican actor working in a call centre, receives the opportunity of a lifetime: a role as a serial killer on a French TV series. But as he prepares for the audition, he starts falling in love with the psychopath he is to play.

Beatrice and Cesar are drawn deeper into a city populated with visions and warnings, taunted by the chorusing of a group of young women, trapped in a windowless room, who all share the same name ... Natasha.

A startlingly original novel that recalls the unsettling visual worlds of Cindy Sherman and David Lynch and the writing of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami, The Natashas establishes Yelena Moskovich as one of the most exciting young writers of her generation.

Reviews

A brave, original work... Moskovich's prose radiates with heat... written in a Cubist jumble of voices, languages, and textures, The Natashas reads as if one were spinning a radio dial of the world... [it] urges the reader to sink back in, connect, breathe. -- Lauren Elkin * Financial Times *
Beautiful, original and distinctive - a stunning new voice -- Jenni Fagan
A surreal and distinctively written exploration of identity... wonderfully original. -- Kirsty Logan * Guardian *
A haunting, unknowable novel, and no less beguiling for that. * Daily Telegraph *
Confounding and beguiling in equal measure; prose that reads as heady yet ephemeral as smoke. -- Lucy Scholes * Independent *
Feels like a feminist Murakami novel, transported to the jazz clubs of Paris ... The Natashas is an enjoyable breath of fresh air. It deserves to be big. * For Books' Sake *
A hallucinatory torrent of imagery and ideas that moves entirely according to its own rules. -- Alastair Mabbott * The Herald *
A surreal, unknowable novel, reminiscent of a David Lynch film. * Irish Times *

Author Bio

Yelena Moskovich was born in 1984 in the 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 Masters 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. The Natashas is her first novel.