Expulsion & Other Stories

Expulsion consists of two parts: a group of short stories and one novella. But the main protagonists share one thing: they are all women coming of age, whether in post-Stalinist Russia (where the short stories are set), or in Vancouver (where the novella is set). In the short stories, set in post-Stalinist Russia, the women are confronted by dictatorship's mundane face - a minor bureaucrat, a school teacher, a doctor. Nobody spells out the rules of survival to the young girls and women, yet each learns to play - or pays the price, that of facing "expulsion". The novella "Face" shares a similar motif of expulsion but takes the reader to a different place - modern Vancouver.

A former professor of Russian Literature at Moscow State University, writer and scholar Marina Sonkina now lives in Vancouver. She divides her time between teaching, writing, tango dancing and taking her students on culture trips to Russia. Marina's previous collection Lucia's Eyes & Other Stories was also published by Guernica.