"From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, New York Times bestseller and Russia's greatest living absurdist and surrealist writer: traditional family drama meets burlesque social satire, enveloped in a Bollywood soap-opera plot. Set in the 1980s and '90s, Kidnapped focuses on the life of Alina, a promising language student who must drop her academic career because of an unplanned pregnancy. Alina decides to give up her baby for adoption after birth and plans to leave the hospital alone. While she's there, she meets Masha, who is looking forward to childbirth and a future with her husband in a republic in South Asia. When Masha dies in childbirth, Alina impulsively switches the babies' name bracelets in an attempt to send her newborn son away from the dull reality of Soviet life. But then the unthinkable happens: Masha's husband asks Alina to falsify her identity and come with him in the foreign service. What ensues is a drama worthy of a soap opera, full of medical deceit, identity scams, and faked deaths. Through it all, Alina survives in unthinkable circumstances, sure above all that she will learn to be a good mother"--