Author(s): Yelena Moskovich

Novel | LGBTQI+ | Crime and Thriller

Moskovich (Virtuoso) mystifies with this vivid story of a pair of estranged siblings who immigrated to Milwaukee from the Soviet Union as children in 1991... The dynamic style and psychological depth make this an engaging mind bender. --Publishers Weekly

In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of '91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga's past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.

Yelena Moskovich returns with her latest work, A Door Behind a Door, bearing many of the hallmarks - the post-Soviet diaspora, the mesmeric blending of past and present, desire and violence - of her previous novels, Virtuoso and The Natashas. This time we are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the protagonist Olga receives a phone call opening up a Pandora's box of haunting memories and unsolved puzzles from her Soviet past.
--Matt Janney, The Calvert Journal, Books to look forward to in 2021

Review: Moskovich draws on Clarice Lispector, Sophie Calle, and even Pauline Reage, as she moves around the page, the body, the world.
--Grace Lavery, BOMB Magazine

"Yelena Moskovich's previous novel, Virtuoso, introduced us to a multinational cast of characters and focused on the trauma experienced by emigrants from the former Soviet bloc as they adjust to life in the west, often at the expense of their closest relationships. Virtuoso makes use of fractured timelines and episodic narrative techniques that are particularly effective in conveying the radical sense of disjuncture at the heart of both the migrant and the queer experience; Moskovich's skill in using form as an active part of the narrative makes for a memorable reading experience. Her new novel, A Door Behind a Door, is equally successful in evoking alienation... We don't often see writing like this: genuinely subversive and innovative."
--Nina Allan, The Guardian

Wildly dancing from one page to the next, Moskovich's style not only resembles a play, it also arrests the reader as witness and spectator to Olga's world being flayed open in much the way we might watch a dramatic scene on a stage. Different sections, some as short as a few words, are told from a plethora of unexpected perspectives (including those of an old dog, a shadow, and a knife). These inventive ways of plunging us into different details achieve a delicate balance of the interiority expected from psychological fiction with general atmospheric chaos.
--Mrittika Ghosh, Cleveland Review of Books 

For some, this novel will be about the challenges of the double life of an immigrant, caught in a web between cultures. For others, it's a fable of the American effect--the promise of a new life but the haunting of the one you've left behind... A Door Behind a Door can be read hundreds of times. The new discoveries and opportunities for interpretation won't stop. And in the meantime, you'll be maneuvering through prose so poetic and sharp that you'll long to put the fragment in your pocket, to bring with you toward whatever new life emerges after the experience.
--Madeline Barbush, Independent Book Review