As Nazi tanks roll toward Leningrad in August 1941, an unmarried nineteen-year-old ballerina gives birth to twin girls in the soon-to-be besieged city. Bereft of hope, the dancer—once a rising star at the Kirov—slashes her wrists, but her babies survive, rescued by the devoted friend who arrives just too late to save their mother. The friend, too, is a dancer with the Kirov, and her tutelage and self-sacrifice ensure that the girls, Maya and Natasha, become students at the Vaganova Academy after the Siege of Leningrad is broken.

We meet the twins as they enter their senior year in 1958. At once inseparable and competitive, Maya and Natasha have developed quite different personalities, with Natasha the leader and future star, Maya her loyal follower. But as they turn seventeen, various factors pull them apart: boys; the changing climate of Khrushchev’s USSR; and the approaching end to their schooling, which even in a state-run economy doesn’t guarantee anyone a specific place in the world. But it’s when the state declares that, in response to recent defections by artists to the West, only one member of any given family can join the Kirov Ballet that Maya and Natasha must confront the reality that one sister’s success will come at the cost of the other’s. How each of them responds to that challenge drives the rest of this thoroughly engrossing novel. And although neither girl really recognizes it until near the end of the book, the choices each makes are driven at least in part by their determination to fulfill the goals their mother never had the chance to achieve.

Weaving together such disparate elements as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War competition that drove the exchange between the New York City Ballet’s visit to Moscow and the Kirov’s tour of the United States in 1962, the filming of Sergei Bondarchuk’s monumental version of War and Peace, and the difficult yet rewarding training that produces elite dancers, Maya and Natasha (Mariner Books, 2025) explores the eternal bond between sisters while prompting readers to consider just how far they would go to achieve a cherished goal.

Elyse Durham, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, who is a Greek Orthodox priest. Maya & Natasha is her debut novel.

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