Moskovich (Virtuoso) mystifies with this vivid story of a pair of estranged siblings who immigrated to Milwaukee from the Soviet Union as children in 1991... The dynamic style and psychological depth make this an engaging mind bender. --Publishers Weekly
In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of '91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga's past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.Yelena Moskovich returns with her latest work, A Door Behind a Door, bearing many of the hallmarks - the post-Soviet diaspora, the mesmeric blending of past and present, desire and violence - of her previous novels, Virtuoso and The Natashas. This time we are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the protagonist Olga receives a phone call opening up a Pandora's box of haunting memories and unsolved puzzles from her Soviet past.
--Matt Janney, The Calvert Journal, Books to look forward to in 2021
A Door Behind a Door is loose, dreamy, and symbol-packed... The resurfacing of characters from Olga's past in her new city speaks to the theme of immigration in the novel, of new homes and the passage from old to new--a passage that is perhaps not ever fully complete in the sense that the past cannot be shaken. --Marta Balcewicz, Ploughshares
In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of '91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled