Mother Doll: A Novel

Katya Apekina

Apr 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Christina Delaine

About this audiobook

Zhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn't want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast. She's deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia's great-grandmother Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia. As Irina begins her confession with the help of a purgatorial chorus of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn't been willing to confront. But does either woman have what the other needs to understand their predicament? Or will Irina be stuck in limbo, with Zhenia plagued by ancestral trauma, and her children after her? Ferociously funny and deeply moving, Mother Doll forces us to look at how painful secrets stamp themselves from one generation to the next. Katya Apekina's second novel is a family epic and a meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.

About the author

Katya Apekina is the author of the novel The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish. She has had stories published in The Iowa Review, Santa Monica Review, West Branch, Joyland, PANK, and elsewhere.

Christina Delaine is a SOVAS Voice Arts Award and multiple AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator who has recorded over 100 audiobooks. She is also an Audie Award nominee. An accomplished stage and voice actor, Delaine has appeared on stages across the country and has voiced scores of commercials and video games.