Venetia Welby recommends
Arrival (2022)
Nataliya Deleva
"In her powerful second novel Nataliya Deleva explores the legacy of a childhood scarred by domestic abuse: how the confusion of love with pain creeps into every fragmented shard of adult life, contaminating relationships and complicating motherhood. Through the mythical Samodivi she conjures an enduring archetype of the wild rebel female who has escape, who rejects the ways men control women. There is beauty and tenderness in the creation of her unnamed narrator's new life, in the poetry of survival and renewal, and in the breaking of patterns for her daughter - freedom from shattering cruelty."
