Penguin Modern Classics: There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family

'Love them ­ they'll torture you; don't love them ­ they'll leave you anyway'

In these three darkly-imagined novellas of family life, both cruelty and love dominate relationships between husband and wife, mother and child. Here a devoted mother commits a terrible crime against her own son in order to save him; an ageing poet exploited by her own children struggles for survival; a young nurse fears murder at the hands of her brutal husband. Blending horror with satire, fantasy with haunting truth, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's newly-translated tales create a cast of unlikely heroines in a carnivalesque world of extremes.

Translated with an Introduction by Anna Summers