Despite her attempts to evade him, this figure proves as unrelenting as he is terrifying. What should be a relaxing sojourn swiftly becomes anything but, as a shadowy figure starts to haunt Sasha’s every step. Vita begins with precocious teenager Alexandra Samokhina (or Sasha for short) and her mother arriving for a beach holiday. In the meantime, their next book in translation, Daughter from the Dark, is due to be released in February 2020. Translations of the rest of the trilogy, which shares the same world but not the same narrative, are tentatively also set to be released, although no concrete date has been given. Excellently translated into a flowing English by Julia Meitov Hersey, Vita is the first book in The Metamorphosis trilogy. The Scar also showcases the Dyachenkos' preoccupation with scholastic cultures and modes of learning, a locus of fascination which Vita continues with interrogations of how meaning is made, disseminated, and asserted. This is a tale of deadly hubris and eventual redemption, which demonstrates the Dyachenkos' characteristic blend of genre-defying storytelling, skillful worldbuilding, and metaphysical speculation. To date, the Dyachenkos have one previous novel, The Scar (2012), which was translated into English by Elinor Huntington. Along with Mikhail Elizarov’s The Librarian (2007) and, writing as Max Frei, Svetlana Yuryevna Martynchik’s Labyrinths of Echo series (2009-2014), the Dyachenkos are some of the few contemporary Ukrainian writers of speculative fiction (or “fantastyka”) to be translated into English. Lauded both in their native Ukraine and within a Russian-speaking readership, the work of Marina and Sergey Dyachenko has received numerous awards, including the European Science Fiction Society’s for Best Writers of Europe (2005).

This burrowing and glitching of habitual reality is engineered through the entwined explorations of linguistic limits and bodily transformations, leading to a genuinely unique addition to the fantasy megatext. The novel veers through the betrayals of first love, and the perils of life in a remote college in rural Russia, to the gradual unmaking of the world through the ruptive coordinates of another/a greater reality. Vita Nostra, or “Our Life,” is a mercurial creature.

Vita nostra