Excerpt from Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Of course, the closest beach had an entrance fee. Not letting herself be annoyed by a simple fee, Sasha ran around the fence, jumped off a low concrete railing, and felt the pebbles crunch under her feet. She found a spot on the rocks, threw her towel and sundress down on her beach bag, took off her sandals and made her way down, wincing from the gravel biting into her feet. As soon as she got to the water, she dove in and swam.

This was happiness.

In the first second, the water seemed cold; in the second, warm, like freshly drawn milk. Right near the beach, seaweed and fragments of plastic bags swayed gently in the waves, but Sasha swam farther and farther away, and the water became clear, leaving behind inflatable mattresses and children with bright-colored floaties. The sea opened all around her and a scarlet buoy flashed like a sign of perfection between two stretches of turquoise cloth.

Sasha dove, opened her eyes, and saw a school of gray elongated fish.


On the way back she ran—Mom was probably worried. The uphill road seemed unexpectedly long and steep. She stopped at a store, where a harried saleswoman sold bread, eggs, and potatoes, and the queue was long and solemn. After enduring the line for nearly half an hour, Sasha filled up her bag with groceries and ran down the Street That Leads to the Sea into the garden with the "peacock" trees.

A man stood near a rental agency, a green booth with permanently closed shutters. Despite the heat, he wore a dark denim suit. Under the peak of his dark-blue cap his face had a jaundiced, waxy tint. Dark glasses reflected the sun's rays, but Sasha managed to catch his glance. She cringed.

She looked away from the strange man, entered the hallway that smelled of many generations of cats, and walked up to the second floor, to the door upholstered in black faux leather with a tin number 25 on it.


Every morning Sasha and her mother woke up at four, when their neighbors, the young couple, returned from a nightclub. The neighbors stumbled up and down the corridor, made tea, made the bedsprings creak, and eventually fell quiet; Sasha and her mother dozed off again and woke up next around seven thirty.

Sasha made instant coffee for both of them (the kitchen sink brimmed with dirty plates—the neighbors apologized profusely for the mess, but never did the dishes), and they headed for the beach. On the way to the shore, they bought little cups of yogurt or freshly steamed corn sparkling with salt crystals or jam doughnuts. They rented one plastic lounge chair to share, spread their towels over it, and ran toward the water, stumbling on the sharp gravel and hissing from pain. They plopped into the water, dove in, and lingered in the waves.

On the second day, Sasha got a sunburn, and Mom smeared yogurt on her shoulders to calm the sting. On the fourth day, they went on a harbor cruise, but the waves were choppy, and both of them felt a touch of motion sickness. On the fifth day, there was a real storm, and half-naked lifeguards strolled around the beach, announcing: "Can't swim—alligators abound," as Sasha's mother quoted from an old children's rhyme. Sasha played with the waves and managed to get slammed by an errant rock; the painful bruise took a long time to heal.

In the evenings, the whole town was drowned in music streaming from the nightclubs. Clusters of guys and girls armed with cigarettes stood near the kiosks or box office windows, or sat around old iron benches and participated in social engagements expected of adolescent mammals. Occasionally, Sasha caught their appraising looks. She did not like those guys with their obnoxious, overly made-up girlfriends, yet she felt uneasy—it was embarrassing for a normal sixteen-year-old to be vacationing with her mother like a little girl. Sasha would have liked to stand just like this, in the center of a noisy group, leaning on a bench and laughing with everybody else, or to linger in a café, sipping gin and Coke from a tin can, or to play volleyball on a square patch of asphalt, split by long cracks like an elephant hide. Instead she would just walk by, pretending she had some urgent, much more fascinating business to attend to, and spend her evenings strolling around with her mother in the park or along the boardwalk, gazing at the creations of the never-ending street artists, haggling over lacquered shells and clay candleholders, doing all these rather nice and not-at-all-boring things—but the peals of laughter coming from the teenage clusters sometimes made her sigh heavily.

Excerpted from Vita Nostra by Sergey Dyachenko and Marina Dyachenko. Copyright © 2018 by Sergey Dyachenko and Marina Dyachenko. Excerpted by permission of Harper Voyager. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.