We have our typical love stories, sweeping novels about happy endings and till death do us part. Very infrequently do we have everyday stories of clandestine love. Ordinary, unremarkable, almost-missed. But is that not how we live? Beneath hideous clamour with the most insignificant stories of our lives. And that is how they start to move, crawl. Like the people in this special book, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s rather unique sounding There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself.

Honest, simple and out there. Mini pancake-like helpings, one lead to the other, a seamless fluid that gurgles. An unexpected love story, a brief one, a lonely one—all humane. In the crazy corners of our room where big stories do not make sense, they are so terribly large after all, there is space for these small ones, stories like flashes, gone in a blink, not gone ever.

Curious to read it? Buy it here