Vita Nostra

Sasha Samokhina, a Russian teenager on summer vacation with her mother, is approached by a stranger who coerces her into a series of inexplicable tasks. The reward is placement at the Institute of Special Technologies, a remote school in provincial Russia where the curriculum is grammar, where the textbooks are unreadable, where students who fail are punished through their families, and where students who succeed cease to be human. The Dyachenkos build a magic system out of language itself, words as living things, syntax as the structure of reality, and Sasha's three-year descent into the curriculum is the slow undoing of every certainty she brought with her.