From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Russia's greatest living absurdist and
surrealistic writer and New York Times bestseller: traditional family
drama meet burlesque social satire, enveloped in a Bollywood soap-opera
plot.
Set in the 1980s and '90s, Kidnapped focuses on the life of Alina, a
promising language student who must drop her academic career because of
an unplanned pregnancy. Alina decides to give up a baby for adoption
after birth and is set to leave the hospital alone. In the hospital she
meets another girl, Masha, who is happily looking forward to the
childbirth and speaks up of her life plans with the husband in a
republic in South Asia.
When Masha dies in childbirth, Alina impulsively exchanges the babies'
name bracelets in an attempt to send her newborn son away from the dull
reality of Soviet life. But then the unthinkable happens: Masha's
husband asks Alina to falsify her identity and come with him in the
foreign service. Full of twists and turns, Kidnapped results in a drama
worthy of a daytime soap opera: medical deceit, identity scams, and
falsified death abound. Despite it all, Alina survives against all odds
in unthinkable circumstances, sure above all that she will learn to be a
good mother.
