Han Smith’s debut novel sets the reader down in an icebound town “in the middle of nowhere”. This cursed place of gas plants, hazardous apartment blocks and decaying civic architecture is not named as but bears significant resemblances to post-Soviet Russia. It is here that a teenage girl, “the almost daughter” – a moniker that seems to hint at her mercurial identity within the family unit – lives with her mother, father and brother.
At first, the almost daughter’s life is ordinary enough. In the evenings she listens to her brother watching porn on his laptop through the thin walls of the family’s apartment, or to her mother practising her English on video calls with a woman in Bristol. But soon a “strange time” begins, with the unexplained installation of a portrait of the “taut-polished” president in the lift of the apartment block where the family live. This portrait – which turns out to be a hidden-camera prank, recording the public’s reactions – provokes discomfort, defacement and outright hostility from the building’s residents. And for the almost daughter, it precipitates the beginnings of a political, and later romantic, awakening.
