A tragic-comic look at the flourishing market for e-mail order brides,
Moonlight in Odessa is a novel about the choices and sacrifices that
people make in pursuit of love and stability, and the lengths that we
will go to to help - and hinder - each other in search of a happy
ending. Odessa , Ukraine is the humour capital of the former Soviet
Union, but with prices rising and employment prospects falling, there is
little for Odessans to laugh about. After months of searching, Daria,
twenty-five and armed with an engineering degree and perfect English, is
offered a plum job as a secretary at a foreign company.
But
there's a stone in every plum, and in this case, it's her new boss Mr.
Harmon, who makes it clear that sleeping with him should be the first
item on her to-do list. Loath to give up her newfound perks (the taste
of real coffee, a new apartment and a salary she and her grandmother can
actually live on), Daria manages to evade Harmon's advances by
recruiting her neighbour, the slippery Olga, to be his mistress - a plan
that ends up working only too well...And so Daria finds herself
moonlighting as an interpreter at Soviet Unions , a dating agency
specializing in finding gorgeous Odessan brides for lonely Americans.
Daria - so adept at spotting the cracks in the relationships she
facilitates - soon discovers that she is not immune to the temptations
of the American dream herself. An email correspondence with an
apparently shy and sensitive American teacher who offers her a new life
in San Francisco, leaves her facing a choice between her beloved city -
not to mention the attentions of Vlad, a worryingly attractive mafia
gangster - and her long-dreamt-of escape to the land of the free.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MELISSA NATHAN AWARD FOR COMEDY ROMANCE
