There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
  • Published: 7 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780718192075
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

Formats & editions
EBook
28 Mar 2011
Paperback
7 Mar 2011
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Darkly compelling, completely unforgettable modern fairy tales in their first ever UK publication

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife's face; and a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams.

In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales.
  • Published: 7 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780718192075
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

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 Russia's most prestigious prize, the Triumph, for lifetime achievement.

Also by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

There Once Lived A Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In
There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, And He Hanged Himself: Love Stories
Through The Wall
See all

Praise for There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

'Gave me nightmares ... These stories work the boundary states of consciousness like a tongue works an aching tooth'

Elle

'A revelation - like reading late-Tolstoy fables set in an alternative reality'

New Yorker

this short and rather extraordinary book of "Scary Fairy Tales" [...] succeed - in many cases quite hauntingly.

Theo Tate, Sunday Times

An entrancing collection of tales, as humane and unsentimental as Chekhov, as grim and funny as Beckett, as dark and unsettling as Poe.

Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday

Penguin has given this book instant promotion to 'modern classic' status and it's easy to see why. It is an extraordinary collection of jet-black tales by one of Russian's foremost writers, which has understandably inspired comparisons with Tolstoy. Beat that.

Daily Mail
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