In these three darkly imagined novellas of family life, both cruelty and love dominate relationships between husband and wife, mother and child. Here an ageing poet exploited by her own children struggles for survival; a young nurse fears murder at the hands of her brutal husband; a devoted mother commits a terrible crime against her own son in order to save him. Blending horror with satire, fantasy with haunting truth Ludmilla Petrushevskaya"s newly translated tales create a cast of unlikely heroines in a carnivalesque world of extremes.