Mother Doll: A Novel

Mother Doll is a novel by Katya Apekina, a prize-winning author, that explores the trauma in Russian history through the stories of four generations of mothers and daughters. The story follows Zhenia, a Russian grandmother, who is pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want and her Russian grandmother, Irina, who is dying. Zhenia receives a call from a psychic medium, Paul, who reveals a message from the other side. Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia. As Irina begins her confession with the help of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn’t been willing to confront. The novel explores themes of motherhood, immigration, identity, and war, with Apekina’s humor and wry observations making it a family epic and meditation on generational trauma.