Petropolis: Anya Ulinich

This darkly comic debut is both admirably clever and intensely moving. The satire is spot-on and the word pictures just stunning, but the really smart thing about this book is something that seems very simple but is actually quite tough to achieve. It’s easy reading of the best kind: finely tuned writing that crackles with the chutzpah of its unlikely heroine, and her flinty observations of the all-too-often bleak world around her. The pages fly by, as Siberian mail-order bride Sasha – chubby, awkward, but surprisingly driven – undergoes a series of misadventures, back home in Russia (and her home town of Asbestos 2), and then on a journey across America, from the Arizona desert to a Brooklyn brownstone.

In Russia, life is either bluntly pragmatic or almost pathetically buoyed by old school superstition (one neighbour cuts up newspaper columns by a noted healer and dips them in water which she then presumes to have magical properties). In America, immigrants are imported or tolerated as servants (wives, cleaners) or playthings (for research or rehabilitation), until they manage to work or luck their way into a slice of the American dream. Sasha, caught between worlds, views it all with a cynical and marvellously sharp eye.