Four strong women and an extraordinary family history: Valery Tscheplanowa's powerful debut novel.
An apartment with a blue linoleum floor in a Russian resort near Kazan, where Stalin once spent his summers. It is to this place that Walja returns when her grandmother, Nina, passes away. Walja embarks on a quest for traces, attempting to understand her own origins. Memories of the women she grew up with flood back – profoundly different, yet united in their aversion to dependency. There is her great-grandmother, Tanja, who secretly baptized Walja during a dangerous night and fog operation. And of course, there is Nina, with her purposeful stride and coquettish cherry-red lips, notorious for her lies that made everyone around her appear a head shorter. Yet she had other facets as well. It is only much later that Walja learns about Nina's harsh destiny, a subject she never spoke about. Walja, living between worlds, between a North German village on Highway B77 and the apartment of her childhood in Kazan, gradually realizes how deeply these lives have shaped her.
