Between Dog and Wolf

by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

Coming of age in the USSR in the 1980s, best friends Anya and Milka try to envision a free and joyful future for themselves. They spend their summers at Anya's dacha just outside of Moscow, lazing in the apple orchard, listening to Queen songs, and fantasizing about trips abroad and the lives of American teenagers. Meanwhile, Anya's parents talk about World War II, the Blockade, and the hardships they have endured.

By the time the girls are fifteen, the Soviet Empire is on the verge of collapse. They pair up with classmates Trifonov and Lopatin, and the four friends share secrets, desires, and all the turbulent and carefree pleasures of youth. But the world is changing, and the fleeting time they have together is cut short by a sudden tragedy.

Years later, Anya returns to Russia from America, where she has chosen a different kind of life, far from her family and the bittersweet memories of her friends. When she meets Lopatin again, he is a smug businessman who wants to buy her parents' dacha. Anya comes to the stark realization that memory does not fade or disappear; rather, it moves us across time, connecting our past to our future, joys to sorrows. This powerful novel speaks to how we experience and process grief—for a beloved friend, a cherished ideal for a country, or for youth itself.

384 pages, Paperback

Published October 19, 2023

About the author

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is a Russian-Armenian émigré who moved to the United States in 1995 after having witnessed perestroika and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Writing in English, her second language, she has published fifty stories and received nine Pushcart nominations. Her work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Gorcheva-Newberry is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction; the Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference; and the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction for her collection of stories, What Isn't Remembered, which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award. She lives with her family, splitting her time between New York, Virginia, and Russia.

Reviews

[Anna Gniwotts · Rating 5 out of 5]

exquisite and heartbreaking representation of friendship, love, and loss, as well as the grief for losing a beloved country and childhood. 10/10 sobbed for like an hour during the last chapters

[Reva · Rating 5 out of 5]

this 2024 read has also been haunting me. An excellent book, very nostalgic read and very interesting to see contemporary Russian fiction like this. Gave me a (somewhat expected) razor sharp perspective on the post-soviet russia that I studied very differently last year.

[kittyprincess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional

[Kristina Drake · Rating 5 out of 5]

part of me wishes that I didn’t read this, because now every coming of age story I’ve read just pales in comparison to it