Over the last several decades, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been one of the most admired and acclaimed contemporary writers at work in Russia, and beginning in the late 1980s her plays and stories have been published in Italian, German, and French to far-ranging recognition and acclaim. Now, with The Time: Night, American readers are finally introduced to this remarkable writer.

"Russia is a land of women Homers," Petrushevskaya has said, and it is this informal narrative tradition of ordinary Russian women which gives shape to this novel. It comes to life in the voice of Anna Andrianovna, a woman well past middle age struggling to earn even a bare living as a poet, scribbling notes in the solitary, desolate, yet consoling hours of the night.

Anna is beset with a seemingly impossible burden: to find space, money, time, food, and love for her family - for her hopeless son, Andrei, newly released from a labor camp; for her daughter, Alyona ("my permanent heartache"), whose diary of loveless affairs forms a darkly hilarious counterpoint to Anna's narrative; for Alyona's children, each the hapless result of a different doomed encounter; and for Anna's own senile, psychotic mother.

Here, within the sharp focus of a novel whose compression is balanced by its emotional intensity and acutely evocative physical detail, are four generations of mothers and children, each struggling for their own version of life, each caught in wounding and inescapable patterns of love, hate, pity, and cruelty. The result is a revelation of modern Russian life and of the tempests by which families - Russian and otherwise - are inextricably bound.