Literary autofiction
Retracing the Steps
Two stand-alone novels. One unforgettable childhood.
Book One · Approximately 46,000 words
Her father is the sun
of her world.
Gloria talks at one and reads at three. In a remote village in 1970s Soviet Ukraine, she grows up with domestic help, fifteen dogs, a dovecote and holidays abroad. Her father, the hospital’s chief surgeon, has quietly built a private medical practice far from Party supervision.
She knows the medical encyclopaedia, trains animals and has little patience for village gossip. Other children find her strange; her closest friend is Igorek, another outsider. At home, her father’s brilliance makes almost anything seem possible.
But the gifts that make him extraordinary come with recklessness: gambling, affairs, and the belief that he can always find a way around the rules. As her parents’ marriage fractures, Gloria begins to discover how fragile her paradise is.
A novel of childhood told in a retrospective first-person voice, alive to the comedy of adults and the certainty of a child’s love.
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Book Two · Approximately 90,000 words
A life she can
call her own.
At eleven, Gloria trains at the city’s equestrian school and earns money handling dogs that adults cannot manage. One night she climbs out of her window to rescue a German Shepherd about to be put down as “mad”. She names him Richard and takes him home.
Animals make sense to her. The adult world is less straightforward. The black market brings her forbidden books as well as contraband jeans; young soldiers return from Afghanistan changed by what they have seen. Her independence hardens into disillusionment.
It is her mother, rebuilding her own life after loss, who recognises what is happening and finds a way back to her daughter.
A stand-alone companion to Book One, following the protagonist through a distinct period of her childhood.
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Publication history
First published by AST in 2009, with subsequent editions in 2010, 2013 and 2022, and a Bit-Print edition in 2020.
Television adaptation
Loosely adapted for the family series Olivka, Igorek and Rex, aired in May 2026. Screen adaptation rights are licensed until 2031.
International publication
Available as two stand-alone novels. Translation, audio and graphic-novel adaptation rights are offered for both books. Russian manuscripts and English samples are available; the Book One sample is translated by Simon Hollingsworth.
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