Virtuoso

As Communism begins to crumble in Prague in the 1980s, Jana’s unremarkable life becomes all at once remarkable when a precocious young girl named Zorka moves into the apartment building with her mother and sick father. With Zorka's signature two-finger salute and abrasive wit, she brings flair to the girls’ days despite her mother’s protestations to not “be weird.” But after scorching her mother’s prized fur coat and stealing from a nefarious teacher, Zorka suddenly disappears.

Meanwhile in Paris, Aimée de Saint-Pé married young to an older woman, Dominique, an actress whose star has crested and is in decline. A quixotic journey of self-discovery, Virtuoso follows Zorka as she comes of age in Prague, Wisconsin, and then Boston, amidst a backdrop of clothing logos, MTV, computer coders, and other outcast youth. But it isn’t till a Parisian conference hall brimming with orthopedic mattresses and therapeutic appendages when Jana first encounters Aimée, their fates steering them both to a cryptic bar on the Rue de Prague, and, perhaps, to Zorka.

With a distinctive prose flair and spellbinding vision, Virtuoso is a story of love, loss, and self-discovery that heralds Yelena Moskovich as a brilliant and one-of-a-kind visionary."If Ferrante’s Neapolitan series was condensed into one book and that one book was turned into a person who spent a good deal of time at queer punk shows on X, but then they got clean and a job where they wore pumps and a pencil skirt and longed for all the selves they had to abandon to survive — and then that person became a book — this would be that book."
—Gala Mukomolova, NYLON

"Yelena Moskovich describes her second novel, Virtuoso, as a book about “queerness, diaspora, intimacy between women, anger, eroticism, symbolic and literal death and rebirth.” A truly robust overture housed in relatively few pages, this novel explores all of these profound themes and more through the lives of four women, their loves and losses, their explorations of self and other."
—Beth Mowbray, The Nerd Daily

"Yelena Moskovich ’s second novel revels in its own complexity, blending humour and tragedy, a motley collection of prosthetic limbs and proverbs, fur coats on fire, the Archangel Michael and blue vapour. It spans several European countries and 40 years, and focuses loosely on a trio of women whose lives gradually interlock... It is rebellion, ultimately, that drives Moskovich’s characters — whether in love or identity — coupled with the anti-linear style of the story itself."
—Zoë Apostolides, Financial Times

"This tightly woven feminist novel is a deep exploration of womanhood spanning decades, continents, and digital spaces... Virtuoso is a moving book that defies categorization."
—Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed

"Haunted and haunting... Told through multiple unique, compelling voices, the book’s time and action are layered, with possibilities and paths forming rhythmic, syncopated interludes that emphasize that history is now."
—Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, Foreword Reviews, starred review

"To read Moskovich is to learn how to live and love in an anarchy of plot, form, language, and tradition, but also to understand that it often takes two women to start a fire."
—Isabel Marqués, STETYelena Moskovich was born in Ukraine (former USSR) and immigrated to Wisconsin with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991. Her plays and performances have been produced in the US, Canada, France, and Sweden. She has also written for Vogue, Frieze, Apartamento, Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, and Dyke_on Magazine, amongst others. She is the author of The Natashas, Virtuoso, which was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and A Door Behind a Door. She lives in Paris.