Roses

A two-room flat on the fifth floor of a tower block in a small Siberian town. Svetlana barely leaves it during her short life. She lives there with her mother, and later her daughter, in a tight-knit female alliance that is also bound by an unforgiving hierarchy. Besides the flat's residents, this hierarchy includes Svetlana's older sister and her daughter, who narrates the story. A story of an untameable woman ground down by a hollow daily grind.

The narrator returns to this story eight years after Svetlana died of tuberculosis in 2014. With every page, she realises more and more clearly that she is writing about herself rather than her aunt – similarly tied to a place while others leave it because the country she lives in has unleashed a war against its neighbour.

The final instalment of Oksana Vasyakina's autofictional trilogy, with its stillness, contrasts sharply with the two previous books, which took place on the road. It is a powerful testament to the paralysis of contemporary Russian society.