There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In

"Love them,­ they'll torture you; don't love them, ­they'll leave you anyway."

After her work was suppressed for many years, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya won wide recognition for capturing the experiences of everyday Russians with profound pathos & mordant wit. Among her most famous & controversial works, these three novellas—The Time Is Night, Chocolates with Liqueur, & Among Friends—are modern classics that breathe new life into Tolstoy's famous dictum, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Together they confirm the genius of an author with a gift for turning adversity into art.

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Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than 15 collections of prose, including the New York Times-bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (2009), which won a World Fantasy Award & was one of New York Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year & one of NPR’s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction, & There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband & He Hanged Himself: Love Stories (2013). A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia’s most prestigious prize, the Triumph, for lifetime achievement.