From a UN Peacekeeper searching for meaning in East Timor, to a lonely boy in San Francisco bonding with his dying bohemian grandmother as she recounts her last trip to Italy, to a middle aged man from Boston looking back on his first trip to pre-AIDS San Francisco, to a retired history professor in San Francisco driving cross country to the Boston of his youth, remembering his early struggles with being gay, while a star baseball player in high school and college in the 40s and 50s’s, these novellas sweep across continents, decades, and memories, capturing the aftermath of the loss of innocence.

In Ivan and Misha, Michael Alenyikov portrays the complexities of love, sexuality, and the bonds of family with boldness and lyric sensitivity. As the Soviet Union collapses, two young brothers are whisked away from Kiev by their father to start life anew in America. The intricately linked stories in this powerful debut, set in New York City at the turn of the millennium, swirl about the uneasy bond between fraternal twins, Ivan and Misha, devoted brothers who could not be more different: bipolar Ivan, like their father, is a natural seducer, a gambler who always has a scheme afoot between fares in his cab and stints in Bellevue. Misha struggles to create a sense of family with his quixotic boyfriend, Smith, his wildly unpredictable brother, and their father, Lyov (“Call  me Louie!”), marooned in Brighton Beach yet ever the ladies’ man. Father and sons are each haunted by the death of Sonya, a wife to Lyov, a mother to his sons. An evocative and frank exploration of identity, loss, dislocation, and desire, Ivan and Misha marks the arrival of a uniquely gifted voice in American fiction.