Ilya Leutin’s stories are populated by tough, damaged characters whose emotions run deep. Shot through with unpinpointable yet palpable psychological tension, Leutin’s stories are nevertheless told with wise-child knowingness, halfway between innocence and experience.

A wayward father pays a fleeting visit to his son before disappearing again; a gang of disaffected, teenage would-be criminals plots a heist with dire consequences; an odd but darkly charismatic girl attaches herself to her lonesome classmate; a troubled hood returns to his native village in a flashy car, determined to win the girl he’d left behind; an dogcatcher accustomed to using lethal force muses ambivalently on the meaning of tenderness.

In the title story, a nuanced portrait of friendship, ambivalence and poignant longing, a young man struggles with sexual confusion as the muse of a bearish, talented composer at a holiday camp in the countryside near Moscow.

Leutin’s stories depict a cross-section of young Russians from various ethnic and class backgrounds, all searching for identity, meaning and an elusive sense of belonging. Anna Aslanyan’s deft translation brings these fresh and original tales to English-language readers for the first time.

Ilya Leutin was born in 1986 in Kemerovo, West Siberia, USSR, into an indigenous Siberian family. In Moscow, he studied creative writing at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute and film directing at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. His first book, Ravshan’s Real Stories (published in 2012 under the nom de plume “Ravshan Saleddin”) was longlisted for Russia’s prestigious National Bestseller Award and shortlisted for the Debut Prize.