The Girl from Moscow (Julia Levitina, Pantera)

In Julia Levitina’s debut novel, The Girl from Moscow, Ella Ashkenazi, an aspiring actor on the verge of a breakthrough role, discovers she is pregnant. It’s a low-key beginning to a gripping and tense novel set in the Soviet Union of the early 1980s, at the height of the Cold War. An impromptu meeting with her activist friend Vlad in the middle of a violent anti-government demonstration marks Ella as a traitor to the KGB. Because of this, the Soviets will extract a steep price from her for her freedom. When Ella approaches the much-lauded director of her acting academy for help, she discovers even he is under pressure from the state. Levitina skilfully weaves in Ella’s backstory to explain how tenuous her family’s position is, primarily because of their Jewish identity. Ella is an ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances. She is romantic and naïve and makes rushed and unwise decisions with little understanding of the consequences. This uneven battle fought by a lone, vulnerable woman against a monolithic state power hooks the reader and provides the intense pace and drama of the novel. Levitina grew up in Moscow, so her descriptions of Soviet Russia are authentic and filled with repression and claustrophobia. The Girl from Moscow will appeal to readers who enjoyed Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, as both novels vividly illustrate how individual freedom is lost under a repressive regime.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Katy Briggs is a marketer with a degree in English and history. She is an avid reader across myriad genres. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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