Sonkina, M: Expulsion & Other Stories

Expulsion consists of two parts: a group of short stories and one novella. But the main protagonists share one thing: they are all women coming of age, whether in post-Stalinist Russia (where the short stories are set), or in Vancouver (where the novella is set). In the short stories, set in post-Stalinist Russia, the women are confronted by dictatorship's mundane face - a minor bureaucrat, a school teacher, a doctor. Nobody spells out the rules of survival to the young girls and women, yet each learns to play - or pays the price, that of facing "expulsion." The novella "Face" shares a similar motif of expulsion but takes the reader to a different place - modern Vancouver.