The Natashas

Yelena Moskovich was born in the former USSR and emigrated to Wisconsin with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991. She studied theatre at Emerson College, Boston, and in France at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre and Université Paris 8. Her plays and performances have been produced in the US, Canada, France, and Sweden. Her first novel The Natashas was published by Serpent's Tail in 2016. She has also written for New Statesman, Paris Review and 3:AM Magazine, and in French for Mixt(e) Magazine, won the 2017 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2017 and was a curator for the 2018 Los Angeles Queer Biennial. She lives in Paris.

Béatrice, 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.'

César, 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.

Béatrice and César 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.

A stunning literary debut with shades of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami