Sonechka

The collection opens with "Queen of Spades," which follows Anna, a veteran eye surgeon in her sixties. She, her daughter Katya, and Katya's teenage daughter and young son all live under the shadow of Anna's mother, a tyrannical, aging former beauty queen whom the family dreads.

"Angel" centers on a middle-aged professor who hides his sexuality. He weds a poorly educated cleaning woman, drawn by her small son, and sets out to shape the boy into a copy of himself.

"The Orlov Sokolovs" tells of two young lovers who are a perfect match, yet the Soviet academic bureaucracy drives them apart.

The title novella, "Sonechka," belongs to a heroine who moves from bookish girl to muse to mother. Her devotion is at once remarkably generous and grimly painful. The author, Liudmila Ulitskaya, is a Russian writer, and these stories first appeared in Russian.