Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, including the New York Times-bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor¿s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (2009), which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York Magazine¿s Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPR¿s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister¿s Husband and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories (2013). A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russiäs most prestigious prize, the Triumph, for lifetime achievement.
Marian Schwartz is a prizewinning translator of Russian literature. She is the principal translator of the works of Nina Berberova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, and others.

"From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, New York Times bestseller and Russia's greatest living absurdist and surrealist writer: traditional family drama meets burlesque social satire, enveloped in a Bollywood soap-opera plot. Set in the 1980s and '90s, Kidnapped focuses on the life of Alina, a promising language student who must drop her academic career because of an unplanned pregnancy. Alina decides to give up her baby for adoption after birth and plans to leave the hospital alone. While she's there, she meets Masha, who is looking forward to childbirth and a future with her husband in a republic in South Asia. When Masha dies in childbirth, Alina impulsively switches the babies' name bracelets in an attempt to send her newborn son away from the dull reality of Soviet life. But then the unthinkable happens: Masha's husband asks Alina to falsify her identity and come with him in the foreign service. What ensues is a drama worthy of a soap opera, full of medical deceit, identity scams, and faked deaths. Through it all, Alina survives in unthinkable circumstances, sure above all that she will learn to be a good mother"--