Anima Fatua

Winner English PEN Translates Award 2025?In Anima Fatua, Anna Lidia Vega Serova draws on her own experiences of growing up in the late Soviet Union to craft a deeply unsettling coming-of-age novel. In the wake of her parent’s divorce, Alia (the novel’s beguiling protagonist) is forced to negotiated her linguistic, racial and sexual otherness amid the maelstrom of perestroika. Despite the many horrors to which she is exposed, largely at the hands of the novel’s grim menagerie of male characters, Alia exerts her own agency at every turn. More antihero than tragic victim, Alia responds in kind to the cruelty around her. She confounds and enthrals as she leads us on a harrowing journey through a country on the brink. Originally published in Spanish to much acclaim in 2008, it has now been translated for the first time into English by Robin Munby – and has been awarded an English PEN Translates award. This is a story full of emotional intensity and dark humour, which in particular will appeal to readers of Margarita García Robayo, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya or Sayaka Murata, looking to delve back into world of complex, charismatic women.

Anima Fatua is a kaleidoscopic coming-of-age novel about a young girl named Alia. Alia’s Cuban father and Russian mother get divorced when she is 9, and she leaves Cuba – and her best friend Malena – for Soviet Russia. Forced to negotiate her otherness – linguistic, racial, sexual – in a country starting to fall apart at the seams, she flees her unhappy existence in a provincial Russian town and is swept up in the maelstrom of perestroika, freer than ever before, but also more exposed. Relying on acquaintances and strangers for a place to live, she discovers the Soviet Union’s hippie subculture. She soon embraces that lifestyle, meeting a host of larger-than-life characters, including a man who calls himself John Lennon, a mystic named Ofelia and a terrifying moustachioed psychoanalyst. Ultimately, however, none of those she meets can fill the void left by her separation from Malena, her first great love. Originally published in Spanish to much acclaim in 2008, here Anna Lidia fictionalises her own real-life experiences. It has now been translated for the first time into English by Robin Munby. This is a story full of emotional intensity and dark humour. Originally published in Spanish to much acclaim in 2008, here Anna Lidia fictionalises her own real-life experiences. It has now been translated for the first time into English by Robin Munby. This is a story full of emotional intensity and dark humour.