Svetlana Rodina is a Russian writer based in Buenos Aires. Her fiction reimagines familiar fairy-tale structures through contemporary adult lives, with a particular focus on family relationships, memory, migration, and the choices that continue to shape people decades later. She is the author of the Russian-language series Visiting Fairy Tales. For Adults. Her work has been translated into English and Spanish, and she has been featured in international reviews and interviews about her fiction and writing.
Works:
Red Riding Hood: The Letter from the Wolf — literary/upmarket family mystery, approximately 50,000 words. At fifty-three, Rose discovers that the father she believed died in childhood may instead have disappeared. As her mother's dementia advances, she reconstructs the family past through photographs, letters, archival records, and conflicting memories. The novel is available in Russian, English, and Spanish. Visiting Fairy Tales. For Adults — a Russian-language series of contemporary novels that reimagine familiar fairy-tale structures through adult protagonists, family relationships, and the choices that shape their later lives.
Purchase:
For readers of literary family mysteries, emotionally precise women’s fiction, and book club fiction.
Her father did not vanish. He was edited out.
At fifty-three, Rose Hood has become skilled at living beside loss: an ageing mother in Moscow, a grown son pulling away, a career quietly reducing her to “institutional memory”, and a city that keeps people company without offering comfort.
Then a worn parcel arrives at her Buenos Aires apartment: photographs, tram tickets, old receipts, and a file marked with her name. Inside is a version of her childhood that does not match the one she was taught to survive.
As Rose follows the trail through archives, railway stations, forgotten apartments and the neighbourhood where her father may have lived within reach, her mother begins to forget the only facts that might still matter. The family story is collapsing from both ends: the documents are speaking, and the witness is disappearing.
Dry, atmospheric and unsentimental, The Archive of Absence is a literary mystery about memory, family secrets, late-life reckoning, and the stories families rewrite in order to survive.
Website:
svetlana-rodina.com