Hugh Aplin

Anna Starobinet͡s

Seven-year-old Maxim lives with his mother and identical twin sister in Moscow's Yasenevo district. Though he is perturbed by his parents' divorce, nothing could prepare his family for the young boy's transformation as he enters adolescence. His increasingly horrifying physical shape, strange behaviour at school, refusal to wash and hoarding of houseflies are just some of the developments that alarm his now-alienated mother and sister. Only when his diary is discovered does the sinister and wholly unexpected truth behind his metamorphosis from boy to monster come to light. The characters in this and the other stories in Anna Starobinets' acclaimed first collection inhabit a disturbing modern Russia. Drawing the reader in to an eerie world, Starobinets blurs the boundaries between the real and the imagined, filtering sinister occurrences through the narratives of unstable minds. Her unsettling imaginative territory and the simplicity of her prose have drawn comparisons of Starobinets' work with that of authors as varied as Kafka and Stephen King. An Awkward Age is a haunting and beautiful evocation of a society entering a new phase of its history, and an example of contemporary fiction at its finest.

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