Katya Apekina’s ‘Mother Doll’ isn’t your ordinary ghost story

On the Shelf Mother Doll By Katya Apekina Overlook: 320 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. He wasn’t guessing 13 or 69 over and over again.” Apekina’s interest in other ways of knowing informs her new novel, “Mother Doll,” a wild multigenerational story set both in modern-day Los Angeles and in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution. ‘I don’t want this at all.’” Apekina had already started working on “Mother Doll” and her personal interest in psychics and mediums became research for the work in progress. I was thinking about talking to the dead.” While none of the characters in “Mother Doll” are based on Apekina’s relatives, their stories and experiences helped her bring them to life. “On one level,” Moshfegh said, “her descriptions are so frank, so astute and so smart, I’m put at ease, thinking, ‘Here I am in a world that has been observed and transmitted to me so keenly, it feels absolutely real.’ But then she makes these audacious, dangerous moves in the story that are just boggling and fantastic, and I think, ‘This is new, this is magical, and yet this feels absolutely real too.’” The novel is at its most real when it comes to the particulars of Zhenia’s pregnancy.