Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

The Indigo Press is an independent publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, based in London. Guided by a spirit of internationalism, feminism and social justice, we publish books to make readers see the world afresh, question their behaviour and beliefs, and imagine a better future.

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry was born in Armenia and raised in Soviet Russia. She moved to the USA in 1995, after having witnessed perestroika and the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Writing in English, her second language, Kristina has published fifty stories and received ten Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for her debut collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, long-listed for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize.

Between Dog and Wolf, published to rapturous reviews in the USA as The Orchard, is her first novel.

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry © Ivan Morozov

Between Dog and Wolf

Moscow, 1985. Four teenagers – Anya, Milka, Petya and Aleksey, whose lives, like those of their Western counterparts, are fuelled by sex, alcohol and cigarettes – yearn for a world of Levi’s, Queen, foreign travel and the freedom to choose their fates. Instead, they encounter heartbreak and tragedy, while all around them Soviet policies, cruel but familiar, are giving way to untested concepts such as glasnost and perestroika and a brief flourishing of hope before the next repressive regime takes root.

This is the hour between dog and wolf, twilight, when one state has ended and another has not quite begun.

Although it depicts a chaotic and desperate era, this exceptional debut novel pulsates with life. It is radiant with friendship and love, the power of international literature, values and politics, as its characters struggle to survive, to save their country and one another.

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