Forty Rooms

'Forty rooms'' is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family's Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, material accumulations, and home comforts-- until one day she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt her.