In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's fiction, short stories draw upon the traditions of Russian folklore and the fairy tale, replacing familiar enchantments with cramped apartments, mysterious illnesses, desperate families and the occasional visitor from beyond the grave.

Organised into sections including Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories and Requiems, the collection moves between ghost stories, urban legends, grotesque comedy and unsettling accounts of transformation. Petrushevskaya's prose is deceptively plain, often adopting the matter-of-fact authority of oral storytelling while allowing increasingly improbable events to unfold without explanation. Her characters confront situations in which the distinction between miracle and catastrophe is not always immediately apparent.

Written against the background of Soviet and post-Soviet life, these tales suggest that horror requires very little invention when ordinary existence has already become sufficiently strange. Translated from Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers.

Penguin Classics, London, 2011. First British Penguin Classics edition. Modern Classics paperback with illustrated wrappers. Moderate rubbing, creasing and edgewear to covers, particularly along the spine and corners. Interior pages appear clean and well preserved.