Vesna Goldsworthy dedicates her third novel to “my friends who, like me, grew up east of that line from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”. Her gloriously vivid tale moves from 1981 to 1990, as the Iron Curtain – along with old Soviet certainties – weakens and falls. Its narrator swaps east for west for love, but struggles to find happiness in either.
Milena Urbanska is the daughter of the second most powerful man in an unnamed Russian satellite. The state has “staid manners and a miserable coast”, but hers is a life of Ray-Bans, Yves Saint Laurent jerkins and the latest fridge freezers. The barrier to the west may be porous to the powerful, but the listless Milena guards her own privacy with adolescent rigour. She cocoons her black-clad body in neoclassical mansions and lakeside retreats, and shakes with fury when her essay is called out for nepotistic praise at a school ceremony. After her boyfriend (the owner of “the only LP of Evita this side of the Iron Curtain”) dies in an accident, she asks Daddy for a translation job, numbing her trauma with a succession of maize cultivation studies. When a rare literary conference is announced, she agrees to shadow Jason, a visiting English poet.
